


never rains but it pours

by surreptitiously



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, The Magicians (TV), The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-26 13:49:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 32,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19007068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surreptitiously/pseuds/surreptitiously
Summary: Eliot and Quentin at the end of the world.(A Good Omens remix.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The Magicians and I are not on speaking terms right now because it recently stabbed me with two axes and exorcised me of the will to give a shit, but I spent many months foolishly overinvesting so I wanted to finish this for closure. It extremely got away from me.
> 
> If you haven't read Good Omens, you should go and read Good Omens (or wait three days for the TV show to drop)! This will make much more sense if you have some familiarity with it, but you can probably get away without it so long as you know the basic premise. Plum Purchas from the third Magicians book also features in this, just to make it as niche as possible, but I don't think you need to know exactly who she is to get her whole deal.
> 
> I've taken artistic liberties with so many things it's impossible to list, and I'm sure I've made a million mistakses along the way, so if anything seems wrong then you're probably right. My apologies in particular to Good Omens lore and Boston.
> 
> For Meg, Katy, and Rosie - long live the walls we crashed through etc <3

Eliot did not handle news of the impending apocalypse with aplomb.

“Oh shit,” he said the morning after, waking up and peering at the woman next to him.

She rolled over, caught sight of his appalled face, and snorted. “Please. Like this would be the first time.”

“The other times, there were other people there,” he pointed out. His head was pounding. “One on one, that’s practically _missionary_. That’s what I call a low point. This really is the end times.”

“You should be so lucky,” she said severely. “Sober up and you'll remember. You drank a bottle of tequila, took all your clothes off, and passed out at 10PM. It was very sad.”

“That doesn't sound like me,” he said faintly, but did as she said. It was not an improvement. “Ugh.”

She kissed him on the shoulder and sat up. “K, I gotta go. Things to do, etc.”

That was the way with Margo nowadays. She was always leaving to do something mysterious. Back in the day, at the birth of Creation, they’d done everything together, but something had shifted along the way. Maybe at some point in the 1780s; he wasn’t sure. That century had honestly been a blur.

“Fine.” He watched her wriggle her skirt on, some kind of short structured thing. He still had a nasty taste at the back of his throat; you could never fully get rid of a hangover the fast way.

“You okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

She sighed, and sat on the edge of the bed. “El, you’re not exactly having the standard corporate response to the news that we’ve won. The cosmic battle, the ultimate war - does that not ring a bell?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I’m practically tingling with excitement.”

He peeked at her. She didn’t seem convinced.

“I know this sucks,” she said baldly. “Come on, I’ve been here as long as you have. I’ve slept with enough humans to not totally hate them, too. But this is happening, El.”

“How do you know, anyway?”

“I just do. Look, I’ve got to go, but I’ll see you soon, okay? I’ll be incommunicado for a while, so don’t worry. Don’t give yourself liver damage, you’ll never get a new body in time.”

“Ha ha.”

He stared at the ceiling until she’d gone. The end of the world as he knew it - and after six thousand years, it was safe to say he knew it pretty well. He supposed that if he’d been paying attention, he’d have seen it coming. The triumph of Hell was what they’d always been working towards and it was true, after all, that the work had started petering out at some point. Back at the start, being a demon had been about individual people - corruption, temptation, you name it. There hadn’t been so many humans back then. Then they'd started to multiply, and they all had _imaginations_. The things they came up with were worse than anything Eliot could ever dream up, not when the thing he was proudest of these days was bringing back low rise jeans.

And it was also true that he hadn’t heard from down below since about 1993. He’d figured they might have just forgotten about him, but maybe they just had bigger fish to fry.

The apocalypse. It was hard to imagine it all finally ending, just like that. And then what? Hell on earth, he guessed.

“Fuck,” he said out loud, resignedly, and swung himself out of bed. He had to talk to someone.

* * *

 

The angel had started going by Makepeace sometime around 1702, which was also when his commitment to blending in with humanity had increased exponentially in fervency from “relatively normal” to “a can of worms everyone knew better than to open”.

(In April 1912, Eliot had drunk a bottle of absinthe and written a poem he'd sentimentally called The Cruellest Month on a very large napkin in a Parisian bar, which he promptly lost. QED. He didn't like to brag about it.)

'Quentin’ was a later addition, though now it was so much a part of him that Eliot couldn't even remember what his name was to start with. He remembered what he looked like, though, at the start; he'd been leaning into the whole divine act then, wings and all, glowing with some kind of righteous fire that sometimes made the ends of his hair smoke.

Now he just looked damp, which was a sign of the times if anything was. It was a grey day in Boston, Novemberish chill settled firmly in, and he was wearing ratty jeans and a truly blinding yellow rain poncho, a beanie with a whale on it pulled down over his ears. He was handing out flyers - or at least, vaguely waving flyers at passers-by, who were ignoring him. A closer look at the poncho told Eliot that the flyers were something to do with literacy, or guide dogs, or maybe endangered animals. There were lot of causes Quentin was interested in and he was utterly useless at furthering any of them, being more equipped for miracles than he was for the grind required by a hopeless cause.

He snuck up behind him and said “Nice hat” right in his ear. Quentin yelped gratifyingly and jumped, actually did a tiny leap into the air.

“Someone's highly strung,” Eliot commented, delighted. “Bad day at work?”

Quentin levelled a grim look at him. “I thought you were in New York?”

Eliot shrugged. “Nope.”

“Great,” said Quentin, and moved over so that Eliot could stand with him under the relative shelter of a tree. Eliot lit up a cigarette and Quentin looked at him, incredulous. Eliot paused, looked again at the poncho, realised that it said 'FUNDRAISING FOR CANCER RESEARCH’, and rolled his eyes but flicked it away.

“Thank you,” said Quentin. “So why not?”

“Not what?”

“New York. You told me to shoot you if you ever set foot over state lines.”

“Not true. You know I love a college campus. Such easy pickings.”

Quentin threw him another reproving look and opened his mouth to say something but was distracted by a stressed-looking blonde student hugging her books to her chest, throwing Quentin a tight smile as she went by. Quentin smiled back, offering her a flyer, which she took, muttering, “Thanks, Q.”

“'Q’?” echoed Eliot, staring after her. “Who is _that_? Don't tell me you've finally lost your virginity.”

The colour rose in Quentin's face. “Virginity is a social construct, it's not - it doesn't even apply, first off. And she's just a friend. And I’ve _had sex_.”

“Mmhmm,” said Eliot.

Quentin opened his mouth as if to argue then snapped it shut again, taking a deep breath. “Look, if you're just passing through and decided you'd stop by to be an asshole then I'm kind of busy here so…”

“I'm not, actually,” said Eliot. “Passing through, that is. I came to find you.”

Quentin threw him a bitchy look, like, _and?_ It wasn't as if Eliot did this all the time. People usually came to him. He'd only gone looking for one person in the last five hundred years, and that had been Oscar Wilde. But here was Quentin, acting like of course Eliot would be here; where else would he be?

Quentin was the enemy, strictly speaking. But after six thousand years, arbitrary distinctions such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ tended to lose all meaning, and if you’d known someone that long, you were more or less stuck with them. Eliot didn’t hate that.

“Let’s get a drink,” he said, and clicked his fingers.

Then they were in the bar of the Plaza in New York. It was quiet and warm, both improvements, and they already had drinks in front of them: Eliot an espresso martini, Quentin a tooth-rottingly sweet-looking cocktail with an umbrella in it.

Quentin looked down at himself and scowled. “For fuck’s sake, Eliot, how many times do I have to tell you that you can’t just change my clothes for me? It’s _weird._ ”

“But I just did,” said Eliot blithely, flagging down a waiter and relieving him of a bowl of olives. “Look, you clearly can’t dress yourself. You don’t want to violate the dress code.”

He did look better now, in an open-necked white shirt and slacks. At least, he looked dry, and he wasn’t wearing a beanie, which counted as better in Eliot’s book.

It happened a lot around Quentin. Eliot always wanted to reach out and fix little things like that, to trim his hair so it wasn't falling in his eyes all the time, or to get him clothes that made him look a little less sad and nerdy. It left him wrongfooted; making things better wasn't exactly his specialty. And it wasn't exactly like he could reach out with his thumb and rub away that worried line on his forehead, so his strategy was usually to piss him off until the issue resolved itself. Plus, it was fun. “You feel bad that you left halfway through your shift, don't you.”

“I didn't leave, I was -”

“- don't be melodramatic, that's my thing -”

“Kidnapped!” said Quentin loudly. The couple at the next table looked over, alarmed. Eliot smiled reassuringly at them. “And yeah, I _was_ halfway through my shift, and I know that you think human time is irrelevant, but that's because we've got the rest of time to do - whatever - and I don't see why you couldn't have waited another hour for me to finish before Disapparating me like a fucking house elf from _fucking_ _Harry Potter_.”

He came to an abrupt halt and took a large gulp of his drink.

“Okay,” said Eliot. “A of all, I have a very good name at this place and altering memories is tedious so stop yelling. B of all, you're such a fucking nerd, and C of all, that's the thing.”

“What is,” said Quentin mutinously into his drink.

“The rest of time,” said Eliot. “Turns out that doesn't have as much credit as we thought.”

Quentin looked up then. “What?”

Eliot paused for dramatic effect, but his voice ended up being a lot flatter than he'd meant. “Apocalypse now, baby.”

“You're kidding me.”

“Serious as a heart attack.”

Quentin looked back down at his drink, swilling it absently with the umbrella. “Jesus.”

“No,” said Eliot, bleakly. “The other one.”

Several hours later, they had migrated to the floor underneath the table.

“I just,” said Quentin. “It just seemed, unlikely, yknow, as a - pig.”

“Unlikely as a pig?” said Eliot dubiously.

“A pig doing something - not like a pig.”

“Flying?” suggested Eliot.

“No,” said Quentin. There was that furrowed brow. Eliot reached out, but Quentin batted his arm away. “Listen. A pig going to _heaven_. But, I guess, that's where they'll all go now? What am I gonna do with them all? Farm them?”

“I expect they would all run free range,” said Eliot. “Frolicking, you know. But we'll win, of course. Every pig alive now: in a few days they’ll be some kind of bizarre torture device, you’ll see.”

He expected Quentin to protest, but he just stared sadly out at the legs of people passing by. “Doesn't matter, does it?”

“What?”

“Heaven or hell. It's a coin toss. It's not here.”

That was the other thing about Quentin, thought Eliot. He just came out with things like that. Not that it was wrong, but Eliot couldn't even think the words without - well. He couldn't even think the words.

“Because I'm not repressed,” said Quentin.

Eliot stared at him. “Did you just read my mind?”

“No,” said Quentin slowly. “I heard your voice. You just spoke about yourself in the third person. Unless….you were speaking...in _my_ mind...”

He gazed into the middle distance, looking troubled, and also high as fuck. Eliot had known the spliffs were a bad idea.

“Okay, that's enough,” said Eliot. “Time to sober up.”

He shook his head clear, and winced as Quentin did the same. It was easy enough to vanish the alcohol from your system, but the trouble with wearing a human body was that something on a cellular level couldn't quite believe it was that easy. It ended up mimicking the symptoms of a hangover for a few seconds anyway. That was something Eliot wouldn't miss when it happened.

Not that he would have a body that could get drunk in the first place.

“Who told you, anyway?” asked Quentin. “How did they know?”

“Friends in low places,” said Eliot. “Obviously nobody important trusted me with it, so I don't have all the details. Someone else must have organised the swap. I just know it - he - the Antichrist, whatever - is here on Earth and is going to come into his powers in the next few days. Then it'll begin.

“Days.”

“Hours, worst case. You should go fuck that blonde while you still can.”

“Jesus,” said Quentin. “Can you drop it? She's just a friend. We volunteer together sometimes: that's it.”

“Adorable,” said Eliot lightly. “Vomit-inducing, but adorable.”

“Look,” said Quentin. “No offence, but what are you actually doing here, Eliot?”

“What?”

“Why are you here? Or - why'd you come to Boston? I mean, I'm glad you told me. I think. I just, I don't know, I don't get what you want.”

Eliot stared at him. What did he want? He hadn't really thought about it like that. He'd just acted on impulse. It was how he made most of his decisions.

It wasn't that they were friends, exactly. Eliot had a friend, Margo, and even that was deviating from demon norms. He'd just known Quentin for a very long time. They were total opposites, cut from entirely different cloth, yeah, but the weird thing was, it amounted to the same thing. Quentin had always been a little bit too _invested_ whereas Eliot's problem was exactly the opposite - the last time he'd sent a report to his superiors, it had mainly focused on how much Crocs had taken off recently, and needless to say he hadn't heard from them since. But they had being bad at their jobs in common and that was a strange kind of kinship.

And okay, Eliot could admit it to himself: he had a weakness for things that said, metaphorically, DO NOT TOUCH. Hence, demon. It was why he'd ended up spending so much time with Quentin over the centuries. At the start, it had just been that the world wasn't all that big - but then it had gotten bigger, and Eliot kept finding himself wherever Quentin was. A streak of masochism wasn't something to be ashamed of, in Hell.

He'd actually been pretty heroic about it over the past few millenia when it came to Quentin, he felt, but perhaps the apocalypse was a bridge too far.

The apocalypse. He'd always vaguely figured that when it came, he'd have time to unload his stocks, buy a bathtub made of solid gold, and go out in a blaze of glory while fucking someone suitably appropriate in it, but now that it was here, that plan had lost its appeal. Now that they really only had a few days left, all he wanted was more time.

Slowly, and with a sinking heart, he reached his conclusion.

“I think,” he said reluctantly. “I think I'm here to ask you to help me.”

“Okay,” said Quentin warily. “To do what?”

“To stop it from happening.”

There was a pregnant pause.

“I have a feeling it's not attendance optional,” said Quentin eventually.

“I know, I know. But - think of it as like one of your lost causes. It's just one small step from wearing this unflattering beanie hat to save the whales, really.”

“I feel like that's disingenuous,” said Quentin. “Seeing as this is quite literally the lost cause to end all lost causes. What do you even want me to do?”

Eliot shrugged. “Stand around and look cute? Look, I don't know what _I'm_ doing. We can figure it out.”

“That's comforting,” Quentin said sardonically.

Eliot blinked. “Wait, I thought you were Mr Human? I’ve only been politely avoiding bringing it up for about three hundred years. What's stopping _you_?”

“Well, things have changed,” said Quentin. “Sorry, I just don't think there's anything I can do. And - god. I don't know. It's not like it's been really great recently.”

Eliot sat back. “You think we’re going to win.”

Quentin smiled cheerlessly and shook his head. “That’s not what I said.”

“That is so fucked up, Q.”

“Well, pot, kettle,” snapped Quentin. “I really didn't ask for your input. I still don't get - so it could happen any second now. You want me to use the last of my time here on an absolutely futile wild goose chase, staking my whole existence on a plan you don't even have. There's going to be consequences, Eliot.”

“I know that,” said Eliot. “Look, I'm not exactly thrilled either about being - vaporised, or whatever it is happens to us when we die. But what's the alternative? You back in Heaven with your wings and harp and me down in Hell? You want that? Doesn’t that sound bleak as fuck to you?”

Quentin was silent.

“It’s my home too,” said Eliot. “Okay? I like it here. I’ve gotten used to these people. _I'm_ Mr Fucking Human. I don’t want it to end. But I can’t do it on my own, and you're the only person I know who might care enough to help.”

Quentin opened his mouth and then closed it again, looking down at the cocktail umbrella that was still in the empty glass of the drink he'd started out with. His face twisted.

“I mean for the sake of the pigs if nothing else,” Eliot added.

Quentin smiled, then, and looked up. “Fine.”

“Thank fuck for that,” said Eliot. They looked at each other for a second. Relief was spreading warm through Eliot's body like a contact high. Quentin's face was complicated; usually Eliot could read his emotions as though he were performing them through interpretive dance, but there was something in it that was obscuring it now. A kind of sadness, maybe, that he didn't want Eliot to see. But within a few seconds, it began to resolve into the bull-headed determination Eliot was so familiar with, albeit usually from a less favourable angle.

“So we know that there's an Antichrist,” said Quentin. “What else? What's in the literature?”

“Well, in Buffy, they usually hit the books,” said Eliot. “Sometimes there's a convenient weapon. We unfortunately have neither hot librarian nor big gun. Oh - unless by literature you meant the Bible.”

“There's the four Horsemen,” said Quentin, ignoring this. “Horsepeople, even. And signs. Rains of toads, that kind of thing. Omens.”

“I haven't seen anything like that,” said Eliot. “Definitely not in New York. Maybe in Florida. It'd be all over Twitter, though, and I've got the monopoly on that right now, so I'd have noticed.”

Quentin got to his feet, sliding up and out of Eliot's view. A second later, his face appeared below the tabletop, hair falling in his eyes. “Coming? I've got an idea, but you won't like it.”

“Oh, good,” said Eliot. “Well, anything is better than nothing. What is it?”

Quentin let Eliot grip his arm, pulled him up so he was standing unusually close, their feet parallel. He smiled a quick smile, his eyes brightening for the first time all night.

“You're not the only one with friends in low places.”

* * *

 

“You see, it's not fun, is it, just being _whisked_ places -”

“I don't care about that, I just wish I could have showered first, maybe changed, I don't need to be wearing a cravat right now -”

“Well, I thought we were in a rush, on account of, oh yeah, the imminent apocalypse -”

“Bullshit, you're just being a little bitch because you want to teach me a lesson - ”

“I'm just saying you'll think twice next time!”

Still bickering, they approached the alleyway, whose significance Quentin refused to explain to Eliot. It looked filthy. Eliot eyed it with trepidation.

“Are you sure this is the right place?”

Quentin was peering at the walls. “Yep. Okay, let's see - I think this is it.”

He rapped on a steel panel.

“Edgy,” Eliot murmured.

Quentin scowled at him, but before he could say anything, the panel opened inwards, revealing itself to be a door. Just beyond it stood a woman with unruly dark hair and a battered leather jacket.

“It’s you,” she said, sounding underwhelmed.

“Is Julia around?” said Quentin. “It's important.”

She eyed him for a long second, before saying “Wait here.”

“What was that about?” murmured Eliot. Quentin pretended not to hear him.

She was back in seconds. “K, you can come in.”

Eliot had expected it to be a hipster bar, and he wasn't exactly wrong. The lighting was right, single exposed lightbulbs which made the room far gloomier than it needed to be. The seats were all beer barrels and the tables were all doors: so far, so millennial. But the patrons were a real mixed bag, ranging from college-age kids in sweatpants to a group of suits who Eliot could just smell worked in advertising and were absolutely off their faces to grizzled old men who looked like they'd just stepped out of a homoerotic cowboy movie, all jumbled together and talking in low voices. Where he'd expected to see a well-stocked bar was a tall glass cabinet filled with books, and another door, where the woman led them.

This opened out into a much smaller room, with much fewer people in it. There were bookshelves all around the walls and a few squashy armchairs. The woman who'd brought them in made a beeline for one which was occupied by another woman, slight and dark-haired and balancing a book on her knees with her feet tucked underneath her.

When she saw Quentin, she unfolded gracefully, crossing the room to hug him. “Q.”

Eliot eyed the first woman, who was leaning on the back of the vacated armchair, watching with eyes narrowed.

“This is all very sweet,” he said. “But I think introductions are in order.”

They separated, Quentin rubbing the back of his head. “Uh, yeah. This is Julia. Julia, this is Eliot.”

Eliot looked at Julia, who looked frankly back at him. She had fine, delicate features and must have been a foot shorter than Eliot, but there was something about the way she stood, loose-limbed but back straight as a rod, that put Eliot on his guard.

“He's like you?” she asked Quentin.

Eliot raised his eyebrows. “She knows?”

“Knows what?” asked the other woman sharply, moving forwards. They were now clustered slightly awkwardly by the fireplace. Eliot glanced at the other people in the room, but they were all looking studiously away.

“Eliot,” said Quentin evenly, “Julia is a witch. Julia, Eliot is a demon.”

“ _This_ is your idea?” said Eliot. He glanced at Julia. “Well, you were right. I don't like it.”

Eliot had been an East Coast demon for a very long time. Legitimate witches were few and far between, but he'd known a few. Technically, they were on the same side, he supposed, but it never worked out that way in practice. You knew where you stood with angels, but witches were human. They had free will _and_ supernatural powers. It was a combination that was frequently explosive.

“I know them,” said Quentin. “I trust them.”

“I'm not saying they don't seem great,” said Eliot. “It’s just that most of the witches I've met recently have mainly been goths who overcommitted, or actual psychopaths.”

“I’d say we're not the one who need to prove ourselves in this situation,” replied Julia coolly.  

“Do I not look like a goth to you?” demanded Kady. “Doesn’t mean I won't hex off your dick. We exist.”

“Charming,” said Eliot. “Yet effective. Look, sorry, even if you are for real, I've had some bad experiences with witches in the past. You aren't all Sandra and Nicole in Practical Magic.”

“They're legit,” said Quentin staunchly.

“Look, I know _you_ think so, but - well, how did you even meet her?”

Quentin mumbled something.

“What was that?”

Quentin glared at Eliot. “On the internet, okay?”

“You found her on some skeevy hedge witch forum?”

“Actually, I found him,” said Julia.

“He was on a skeevy hedge witch forum?”

“Not exactly,” she said, suppressing a smile.

Eliot looked between them. “Alright, what the fuck are you talking about? Why are you acting so suspicious? Did you kill someone? Or have sex?”

“ _No,_ ” said Quentin indignantly. Kady looked like she was considering whether Eliot's decapitated head would match the decor in her bathroom.

“Then _what_?”

“It was a Fillory and Further fansite, okay?” said Quentin, the tips of his ears bright red. “Are you happy now?”

Eliot stared at him, and then burst out laughing.

“Are you done now,” asked Quentin testily, a minute or two later.

Eliot wiped a few tears of mirth away from his eyes. “Okay, yeah. Wow, I needed that. Thank you.”

“Right,” said Quentin, rolling his eyes.

“Is the interview portion of this evening over now?” said Julia, smiling slightly.

Eliot hesitated. “Look, you might be a fangirl, and that certainly makes you seem less threatening, but…”

“Yeah, well, you're literally a demon,’ said Kady. “So it's fair to say I've got some reservations of my own. Don't you, Jules?”

“Demons can also be upstanding members of society,” began Eliot, before considering. “Well - being a dick isn't genetically mandated. At least, I'm not currently actively sabotaging this situation. It was _my idea_.”

“Yeah,” said Kady. “Comforting.”

“I trust Quentin,” said Julia, looking steadfastly at Eliot.

“Thank you, Julia,” said Quentin pointedly.

Did Eliot trust Quentin? It was an uncomfortably on-the-nose question. Trust hadn't been a particularly relevant concept to Eliot in his long stint on Earth, if only for the simple reason that most humans didn't really make that much of an impact, and now that he was considering it, it seemed inelegant at best. There just wasn't enough room inside it for the nuance of their situation. Quentin was here, and he needed him, so he supposed he did in that regard. But when it came down to it, they were completely different.

Eliot had made it through the past six thousand years largely by developing a complex defensive layer of mean wit and detached irony, but Quentin leaned into everything with all of his heart, leaving himself recklessly vulnerable in a way that gave Eliot hives just to think about. There was a reason he spent his days flyering instead of just doling out miracles. Despite all evidence to the contrary, despite himself, even, he actually believed that humans were perfectible. It wasn't exactly the traditional way of things, but he put his faith in them.

Eliot thought it was bound to bite him in the ass one of these days. And since the days they had left were numbered, there were even odds it was today.

But then again, what choice did Eliot have? It wasn't as if he had any better options.

“Fine,” he said.

“Great,” said Julia. “Now, sit down, and tell us what's going on.”

She sat back in her seat, and Kady went back to leaning against it, her forearms crossed above Julia's head. Quentin sat in an armchair adjacent to the fire, just opposite from them, leaving Eliot - the other seats were all taken. There was no alternative: he perched awkwardly on the arm of Quentin's armchair, Quentin's hair brushing his upper arm.

“We need your help,” said Quentin. “We have a - problem.”

“That's one way of putting it,” said Eliot. “The small, tiny, little issue of the world ending in fire and flood.”

To their credit, the witches took that in stride. They exchanged a loaded look.

“We wanted it to not be that,” said Julia.

“You knew something was happening?” Quentin sat forward in his seat. Eliot could feel the warmth of his skin through his shirt.

“Kind of,” she said. “Penny went missing a few days ago.”

“Who?” said Eliot. Everyone ignored him.

“Before he went, he was pretty cryptic about it, but - it makes sense now. And we already knew something was up.”

“How?” said Quentin. Despite himself, Eliot's interest was piqued.

“We have this - barometer, I guess, which tells us when magic exceeds normal limits,” said Julia. “Normally when hedges do group rituals, that kind of thing. That's what we thought this was - some fringe groups have been messing with dangerous magic. But it's been going off constantly.”

“Fine, but there's a difference between magic tricks and the changing fate of the entire world,” said Eliot, somewhat pedantically.

“Is there?” asked Quentin. “It's all power, isn't it?”

“Maybe,” said Eliot, unconvinced. “What is this barometer, anyway? I'd feel better if I knew it wasn't just a convenient plot device.”

“We can show you,” said Julia, and Kady disappeared back through the door. “But you have to keep an open mind.”

“Okay,” said Eliot warily.

“So you think it might be the Antichrist?” said Quentin.

“It fits,” said Julia. “We've been trying to find out as much as we can. There have been a few interesting things -”

At this point, Kady returned, holding a basket. She looked both defiant and slightly embarrassed, which did not bode well. Placing it on the floor, she lifted something out of it.

“Sorry,” said Eliot. “Stupid question. Is that a chinchilla?”

“London!” said the chinchilla in a surprisingly musical tenor. “Boston! Hong Kong!”

“So that's one of the interesting things,” said Julia. “It tells you where the power surges are, but they're everywhere. Pretty much every major city in the world. We've tried to calculate whether any one place has the edge, but it's hard to tell. Boston, New York, maybe -”

“That's probably just us,” said Quentin. “We must count, too.”

The chinchilla fell silent, eyeing them beadily, before saying “Shanghai!”

“There’s something else,” said Julia, looking at Kady. “We have data on the surges going back a few decades. We've never seen anything like this, except the exact same thing happened eleven years ago.”

Eliot stared at her. “I'm pretty sure we'd have noticed if the world already ended.”

“Yeah, but what about a near miss?” said Kady. “I mean, if it was minutes away from going down? Our last chinchilla exploded eleven years ago. We just figured that's what they do, I guess, but...”

“Nothing could pull the apocalypse back from happening if it was happening,” said Eliot. Quentin twisted in his seat to make a wry face at him. “This is different. I mean if it was actually minutes away - it's kind of an all or nothing situation.”

“Could something have killed the child?” said Julia. Quentin shifted back to look at her, his body still twisted half towards Eliot. The chinchilla started squawking “London! London!” in tones of increasing urgency.

“Unlikely,” said Eliot. “Even I would have heard about that one. And nothing mortal could have killed the Antichrist. Or, for that matter, put it all back to normal. Not even we could. It takes serious juice.”

“Unless he did it himself,” said Quentin slowly. “Unless he changed his mind.”

“Why would he do that?” said Eliot. “It's not exactly in the programming.”

Quentin’s eyes flickered back to Eliot, then away. “Yeah, well. It's all fine up there, or down below, but actually living here tends to fuck up the programming, don't you think?”

“Well, does it matter?” said Kady. “If that's what happened - whether it died or whether it changed its mind - can't we just do the same thing now?”

“That would be a great plan,” said Eliot. “Except we don’t know what happened last time, where it went down, who the demon was that organised the swap, or if there even was an apocalypse in the first place.”

But even as he said it, he felt a strange sense of deja vu. If he closed his eyes, he could almost picture it: the landline he’d used to have in the Manhattan flat, an open bottle of scotch, Margo’s feet tossed up in his lap with her nails painted a shade of bright blue he hasn’t seen her wear since, and through the open window the sound of sirens -

“If it happened, it happened,” said Julia, watching him. “Even if nobody remembers.”

“London!” said the chinchilla, sounding frantic.

Eliot stared at it, as did Quentin, turning forwards to do so, so that his side was pressed against Eliot’s thigh. It was hard to shift away without falling off the chair. The chinchilla - why a chinchilla, how it could talk, Eliot could tell he would never know - looked back at them, as though it thought they were being remarkably stupid, which was rich coming from a rodent.

“Just supposing this happened, and the Antichrist wasn’t killed,” said Quentin. “I mean, it’s a long shot. But doesn’t that mean he’s still around?”

* * *

 

Eliot was not convinced of the wisdom in listening to a chinchilla, but they didn’t exactly have the luxury of options.

London had, at least, narrowed it down. Eliot knew there was a demon in London. There were demons all over the world, but they tended to be lone operators, demonic work not exactly being a heartwarming team activity, so he'd never spoken to any demon that worked outside of North America. They didn't even have the full extent of their powers outside of their specific regions. Like middle managers who didn't want their employees to start asking for pay rises, Hell did not encourage fraternisation.

There were a few demons in North America who Eliot knew and was on speaking terms with, but he only really liked Margo. He'd tried calling them all, just in case, but couldn't get a hold of anyone.

It was rumoured that in England, they had a kind of arrangement. He supposed it made sense: in a country that size, you probably couldn’t go two days without bumping into any other immortal beings who might live there. He understood the impulse, but he didn’t think he was capable of sustaining that with Quentin. He might be masochistic, but he did have a few brain cells left.

“I can’t remember,” said Eliot. “It was something obvious. Creepy or Spooky or something. He was a snake; think of some snake-related adjectives and try them.”

“That doesn’t narrow it down,” said Kady. “What about you?”

Quentin had been sitting with his eyes squeezed shut, mouth moving wordlessly as he recited the hierarchy of angels to himself. There really were a fuckton of them. He opened his eyes, and scowled. “Well, not _now_.”

He started from the top.

“I can’t believe we have to go to fucking England,” said Eliot. “We have to _fly_. I’d almost rather have the apocalypse.”

“It’s not that bad,” said Julia mildly. “I’m just worried about losing time. Kady and I will keep trying from here, but -”

“Maybe we should keep trying from here, and you -” began Eliot persuasively, but was interrupted by Quentin, who exclaimed “Aziraphale!” with such force he almost fell off his chair.

“Gesundheit,” said Eliot.

“I knew it ended in -ale,” said Quentin smugly. He looked so pleased with himself that Eliot refrained from pointing out that this hardly narrowed things down.

“Well, he has Facebook,” said Kady, looking at her phone. “He looks, like, fifty. Guess he didn’t get your genes. Wait - is that your guy?”

She tilted her phone so that Eliot could see, sending a flicker of recognition through him. “That’s the one. Anthony J Crowley - oh, Crowley. It used to be Crawly.”

It was the angel’s profile picture, and the demon was in it, which was really on another level. Eliot felt a sudden wave of horrified pity for the demon, who had clearly let things go too far.

They were looking into the camera, but incidentally, as though they'd just happened to glance over. The angel was laughing, and the demon was leaning back, hands in pockets, looking pleased. Eliot tried valiantly not to draw any conclusions.

“Says here she took the picture,” said Kady, pointing. “And set up his account.”

“Let me see,” said Julia. Kady passed over the phone. “She's a witch. Look - there’s the tattoo.”

“For fuck’s sake,” said Eliot. “I knew it couldn't be that easy. I knew.”

“Look at this,” said Julia. It was a group picture from some clumsily designed local newspaper website, with the British witch - Anathema - front and centre, next to a man who was holding a squash that seemed too big to be allowed. It was captioned 'Tadfield and Morton Harvest Festival - Lower Tadfield Scoops Prizes!’

“This is almost disgustingly rural,” said Eliot. “What about it?”

“These kids,” said Julia, pointing at the side of the image. There were four of them, looking as though they'd stepped straight out of a charming Victorian schoolyard mystery where they drank ginger beer and frolicked without adult supervision on abandoned railroads. They were clustered around a dog, who was bearing a rosette.

Eliot looked at the boy just behind the dog, and he knew.

“Adam Young,” read Julia.

“Well, that sounds right,” said Quentin.

* * *

 

After that, things happened quickly. It wasn't hard to convince an airline to make space for them on a flight flying out that evening, or that they had valid passports and visas, much as it pained Eliot to do so.

Eliot hated flying. Airports had been a pet project of his, a few decades ago; he'd travelled across the East Coast, checking that the faces of each and every human clutching a takeaway coffee cup and sitting in bays of uncomfortable seats in soulless buildings were as miserable as they ought to be, and he'd called it a job well done. He'd never accounted for him having to actually use one.

“Maybe we should just let it happen,” he suggested as they queued for boarding. “How much worse than this could it be?”

“It’s your fault,” said Quentin unsympathetically. “Besides, we're almost on the plane now. We can't turn back yet.”

“It's only just begun,” said Eliot grimly. “I _hate_ flying.”

“You know we can't actually die, right?” said Quentin. “Even if our plane crashed?”

“I would rather die than have to swim across the Atlantic Ocean,” said Eliot. “Can you even imagine how drying that would be? My skin would be like leather.”

Besides, he didn't add, he wasn't sure if they would make it or not. Once they were in the air, and officially out of America, they would be the same as anyone else on the flight. Eliot was pretty sure that they would still be made of divine stuff, and so pretty much indestructible, if powerless, but he wasn't keen on testing that theory.

“What's your problem with flying, anyway?”

“The food,” said Eliot.

“Well,” said Quentin. “Again, it's your own fault. Make us exempt if you hate it that much.”

“Nobody is exempt,” says Eliot. “I thought I would die before stepping foot on an aeroplane. And, as you pointed out, the circumstances under which _that_ would happen seemed unlikely at the time.”

They moved forward. Quentin had been quieter since they'd left the witches, more morose. Eliot got it: now that they were on their way, it seemed a lot more real. But he didn't think it was just the sense of generalized doom, with Quentin. He pictured him as he'd seen him - yesterday? Was it just a day ago? - alone, in the rain, and swallowed. Things had been less complicated when they'd just left the can of worms well alone.

Finally, they started to board. Once in his seat, Quentin belted himself in diligently and began to read the safety instructions. Eliot investigated the plastic bag, which contained a free toothbrush and a pair of socks, and asked the flight attendant for a Bloody Mary.

Too soon, the plane was taxiing down the runway. As they took off, a sense of mounting dread started to weigh down Eliot's stomach. He was too aware of how fragile the vehicle they were sitting in was; it was awful to feel so disconnected from the ground, where he couldn't be sure of landing on his feet.

And it was stupid, but he couldn't shake the feeling that he wasn't supposed to _be_ there. It was a fallacy that Heaven was perceived to be in the sky and Hell was below the ground; both occupied other dimensions entirely. But he couldn't help but feel like he was trespassing somehow. It made him feel exposed.

It was all he could think about as they gained height. For a lack of anything else to do about it, he tugged on Quentin's sleeve.

“Quentin. Quentin. Hey, angel. Quentin.”

Quentin jabbed at the screen and pulled off his headphones. “What? I'm watching this.”

Eliot peered over. “That's the _charity appeal_.”

Quentin was already rummaging in his backpack for change to put in the envelope.

“You're such a do-gooder,” Eliot said, amused despite himself. Then they hit a patch of turbulence and the dread made itself known again with a vengeance.

“I don't know, every little helps,” said Quentin, straightening. “What did you want, anyway?”

Eliot shook his head mutely, before forcing a quick smile and taking a gulp of his drink. “Nothing. Never mind, it wasn't important.”

Quentin glanced at him, then looked more closely. “You okay?”

“Peachy,” said Eliot through gritted teeth. “Hey, maybe it wouldn't be so bad if we crashed. I could swim across the ocean. My skin has recovered from worse.

Quentin studied him for another long second, before putting his headphones back on. Then, still making eye contact that Eliot didn't know whether to hold or break, he reached over and gripped Eliot's forearm. They sat like that for a moment. Eliot had the bizarre urge to laugh but quashed it prudently.

“What?”

“You go down, I go down,” said Quentin, as easy as that. “You dragged me into this, you're not getting out of it that easy.”

Quentin's hand was warm, and the flesh on Eliot's arm around it prickled. It made for a slightly uncomfortable seating experience but on the whole Eliot could handle it.

The flight was long and Eliot spent most of it picturing the fires of Hell consuming his favourite deli back in Brooklyn, with a short break to switch all the in-flight entertainment to Grease 2.

“I need to let off some nervous energy,” he said to Quentin when he looked round accusingly.

“Fine, but I want to finish this on the way home,” said Quentin, who Eliot could only assume had found an outlet for his feelings in the Lord of the Rings extended editions. There was something so essentially himself about Quentin, even in the most extreme of times. He'd lost some of his wide-eyed fervour, maybe; he was easier to look at directly nowadays. But he could always be relied upon to do the nerdiest, most earnest, least self-conscious possible thing in any given circumstance. That was reassuring, too.

Eliot hadn't been to England in centuries, since the human race had gotten so unwieldy that it was deemed more efficient for demons - and, presumably, angels - to split the labour geographically. It was mostly the same. He took a moment to admire Crowley's work on roundabouts.

They got an exorbitantly expensive taxi to take them to Tadfield, instead of trying to navigate the bus system. Eliot dozed most of the way there, only waking up when Quentin prodded him in the shoulder.

“Eliot, look.” He had an old-fashioned road map spread out on his knees. Eliot dutifully looked, though he could only see more of the same re picturesque fields and charming cottages. “It's the, uh, Plover estate? That's the guy who wrote -”

“Fillory and Further, I know,” said Eliot. “You already said about ten times.”

Quentin practically had his nose pressed against the glass. “Holy shit, I think I can see the house.”

“I promise I'll take you there if we get this wrapped up before bedtime.”

“I can go myself,” said Quentin as they rounded a corner and it disappeared from view. “I'm not saying you have to come, I just think it's pretty cool and you might find it interesting. I think they actually do tours.”

“You're cute,” said Eliot, without meaning to. Quentin glanced at him, ears flushing red, and Eliot looked hastily away. “Oh, look, we're almost there.”

Even Eliot could tell there was something weird about Lower Tadfield. Quentin insisted that he could feel it on a physical level - “it's like it's protected, Eliot, like someone really _loves_ this place” - which Eliot didn't know about, but it was true that it was suspiciously perfect.

Eventually, the driver pulled into a little winding road, at the end of which was a pretty stone cottage. It was the whole package: chickens clucking in the yard, laundry wafting in the gentle wind, an apple tree with unlikely out-of-season fruit marking the front drive.

“Surely there's an adorable milkmaid just out of sight,” said Eliot. “I can't wait for some rosy-cheeked kids to show up and tell us about their day at the gymkhana.”

As they parked, a volley of barking started up. A woman’s voice sounded from inside, shutting it up as soon as it started, and then she appeared in the doorway, holding a hand above her eyes to see who it was. It was the witch, Anathema. She must have been in her early thirties, or maybe her late twenties, and was wearing a paint-spattered men’s shirt. For some reason, she was holding a duck.

Eliot got out of the car while Quentin paid, and stood in the drive, feeling extremely out of place. The last time he'd been in such close proximity to a field was over two hundred years ago. He and the witch sized each other up for a few seconds until Quentin came to stand next to him.

“Well,” she said eventually. “I suppose you'd better come in.”

Eliot exchanged a glance with Quentin before moving forward, only to stop abruptly at the doorway.

“What is it?” said Quentin.

“Uh, this is awkward,” said Eliot. “But could you -”

“Oh!” Anathema juggled the duck into the corner of one arm and reached above the doorway to remove the ancient horseshoe hanging above. “Sorry about that. It's nothing personal, it just stops the dog from getting out. Come in.”

They followed her into the cottage, which was every bit as pretty on the inside as it was on the out. They went through to a bright, open kitchen at the back, where a fat baby sat in a highchair making a mess out of some carrot puree.

“Eliot,” Quentin said, before nodding at the open back door. It led out into a garden that wasn't so much a garden as it was a kind of paddock, where a man with thinning curly hair was actually milking a fucking cow. He looked up at them and grinned.

“Hello!” he shouted. “Sorry, hands full at the minute, ha ha! I'll be right along, Anathema!”

Eliot already had a headache.

“It’s yoghurt day tomorrow,” said Anathema, in tones that were equal parts amused and fond. “Isn't that right, Katie?”

The baby gurgled.

“Hecate to strangers,” Anathema said as an aside.

“Hmm,” said Quentin seriously, peering at the baby as though he was trying to figure out how to ingratiate himself.

“Look, we haven't got much time,” said Eliot, trying to wrest back control of the situation.

Anathema looked at them. “I suppose you'd better tell me what's going on. Let me put the kettle on.”

She pulled an old-fashioned metal teakettle out of a cupboard and deposited the duck unceremoniously in Quentin's arms as she moved to fill it with water. The duck and Quentin gazed at each other with equal consternation.

“Okay,” said Eliot. “Well. It's a long story, so probably best to save questions and comments for the end.”

While the kettle came to the boil, and while she poured strong, dark tea into three hand-painted mugs, Eliot told her everything, with the occasional interjection from Quentin. She listened quietly to the whole thing, occasionally reaching over to wipe the baby's mouth, seeming unsurprised by any of it.

“So, in conclusion,” he said, winding down. “Help?”

She sat down at the table, mug in hand, looking thoughtful.

“Well,” she said. “This explains the note I got from Aziraphale last week. Hold on, let me find it.”

She rifled through a pile of envelopes leaning against the wall, unearthing a sheet of heavy cream paper that looked as though it was deeply embarrassed not to be parchment.

 _Anathema,_ it read.

_It's happening again. I didn't want to tell you before so to not worry you. It will all come right in the end - the Americans are on the case. Crowley wants me to tell you that he thinks this is no reason to be reassured but according to Agnes they'll see it through somehow. As far as I can tell, they'll come to you. If you take them to Adam he'll see them right. Crowley and I are staying out of it this time - we've had enough apocalypses to be going on with for a lifetime, even a very, very long one. Come and visit with Katie (and Newt, if you must) when it's all over._

_Aziraphale_

“Okay,” said Eliot. “I think it’s your turn to explain.”

“God,” she said, before smiling. “Or, you know, not. Where do I even begin?”

“Is Adam the Antichrist?” said Quentin, absentmindedly bouncing the duck in his arms.

As if on cue, an extremely old, slightly mangy-looking mongrel wandered in, collapsing on Anathema’s feet. One of its ears faced outwards, as though it was eavesdropping on their conversation.

“That's right, Dog,” said Anathema, bending down to scratch its belly. “Would you like to tell the nice men about Adam?”

The dog whined sadly at the mention of the name.

“He misses him,” said Anathema. “He does like Katie, but still. He's alright if you keep him on a diet of extremely bloody steak.”

Eliot frowned, distracted. “Uh, stupid question. Is that dog…a _hellhound_?”

The dog raised its head in his direction and snuffled, as if in agreement.

“He is,” said Anathema fondly. “Who's a good beast from Hell? Who's a terrifying monster? Is it you, Dog?”

“Why is there a hellhound here?” said Eliot faintly. “And why does it look - like that?”

“You aren't as well-informed as our ones,” said Anathema. “Dog was a present for Adam when he turned eleven. He looks like this because that's what every 11-year-old wants a dog to look like. He's a sweetheart, really.”

“A sweetheart,” echoed Eliot.

“I’d better start at the beginning, then,” said Anathema. “I suppose Agnes is the best jumping-off point. She was my ancestor, and a witch, and she saw the future.”

There had been an apocalypse nine years ago, after all. Eliot’s tea went cold as he listened to Anathema’s story, which implausibly included everything from prophetic witches to aliens to the lost continent of Atlantis, not to mention a very well-stocked cast of other bit players. As she spoke, the sense of dread began to return. What had happened then made sense, but he couldn’t see how it related to what was happening now - and if he couldn’t find the connection, they were no better off than before. It wasn’t even as though they could replicate whatever had happened last time, which seemed like it had failed basically by amazing coincidence and by the Antichrist’s will, neither of which could be relied upon now.

“I gave the second book of prophecy to Aziraphale,” said Anathema. “I just didn’t want it hanging over my head for the rest of my life, and I knew he’d like it. I suppose Agnes must have prophecied this.”

Quentin pulled the note closer to him, looking at it again. “So - you’ll take us to Adam?”

Anathema shrugged. “We were going, anyway. University term ends tomorrow. I told the Youngs I didn’t mind picking him up. I think Deirdre Young is organising a fete at the school, so they couldn’t make it. You’re welcome to come along.”

Eliot noticed she didn’t exactly sound thrilled. “What’s the catch?”

“I just - I don’t know. I know you’re here looking for him because you think it’s him, but I truly don’t think it is. I’ve known him a long time, now.”

Eliot glanced at Quentin. Trying to be gentle, he said, “I’m sure you have. It’s just - there’s an apocalypse about to happen. He’s the Antichrist.”

“He’s a _student_ ,” said Anathema. “He wants to be an environmental scientist. He loves his dog and his friends and Lower Tadfield. He's a good kid.”

“Well, we need to at least talk to him,” said Quentin. “As soon as we can.”

Anathema sighed. “Well, we can't leave any earlier than 8, anyway. That’s when Newt’s bread comes out of the oven.”

She noticed Eliot's apprehension. “Don't worry. Agnes would have mentioned if we didn't have the time. She's quite good in a crisis.”

Eliot could tell that he was going to grow sick of Agnes.

* * *

 

They had a surreal dinner with Anathema and Newt, who it transpired spent his days variously as a quite bad software engineer and a quite good gardener. Anathema filled Newt in in a few impressively concise sentences, causing him to swear mildly and then agree that of course Quentin and Eliot must go with them to pick up Adam and his friends. The rest of the evening was spent fielding his questions about what it was like to be a demon slash angel, depending on who was in the room at the time.

“It’s nice that it’s all so progressive,” he said, inexplicably, as he showed them where the bathroom was. “Not what you’d have thought, but nice. Is it mandatory, then?”

“What?”

He nodded between Quentin and Eliot. “The two of you. Partners. Just like our ones.”

“Oh,” said Eliot. “No.”

“Well, I’m pleased for you, anyway,” he said. “Here’s your room. Sorry it’s a bit small. I’m up with the sun, so feel free to come downstairs whenever you want. Sleep well!”

A problem presented itself immediately. Eliot realised, belatedly, what Newt had meant.

“I’ll take the floor,” he said. “I don’t - I slept in the car. I might not even sleep tonight, it’s not like it matters.”

“Probably better to be rested,” said Quentin. “Look, I don’t care if you don’t. Take whatever side you want, I’m going to shower.”

Eliot eyed the bed. It was big enough that they didn’t have to touch, and it had been a few days since he’d slept in one. He didn’t need to sleep, it was true, but his body always resented it when he didn’t.

 _This was probably how it started for Crowley_ ,said a voice at the back of his mind, but he ignored it, and started to strip down to his boxers. When Quentin came back, hair wet, he was under the covers.

It was a clear night outside, and even once they’d turned out the lights, moonlight radiated through the gauzy curtain, illuminating the room dully. Safe on his side, Eliot looked at Quentin through the corner of his eye.

He was awake, looking up at the ceiling with his hands resting on his chest. He looked tired, and the shadow in his eyes was back. Eliot watched him stare quietly into space for a few long seconds before he cracked.

“What would you miss most, do you think?” he said. “If - it’s going to work. But if it didn’t.”

Quentin sighed. “I don’t know. Why?”

“There’s no Taylor Swift in heaven,” prompted Eliot. “You’d never get to hear the next album. I mean, what if she went back to country? You’d never know.”

“Don’t even,” said Quentin, but he was smiling. “I guess I’d miss books. I think all they have up there is the Bible and Heidi.”

“Heidi is amazing,” said Eliot seriously. “Lederhosen? Please. But I think you’re right. Did you know that some people think that the air in the Fillory books is part opium? Not exactly PG-13.”

“I didn’t know _you_ knew that,” said Quentin. “I didn’t know you’d read them.”

“I’ve had a lot of time on my hands,” said Eliot. “I ran out of Babysitters Club books, so.”

They fell into a companionable silence. It was so quiet outside. Eliot was used to cities that were always murmuring - or, in the case of New York, shouting - to themselves. It was strange to be in the midst of so much quiet. It made Eliot feel like he was on stage, with three hundred people holding their breaths to hear what would happen next.

“You don't have to convince me, you know,” said Quentin suddenly. Eliot turned his head to the side. Quentin was still looking at the ceiling. There was a beat, then he turned his head to look at Eliot. “I'm on your side. I said I'd help.”

Eliot smiled sheepishly. “I know. I didn’t - it’s not like I think you’ll back out. I know you, Q.”

“Yeah.”

“I just - would you be doing it if I wasn’t here?”

Quentin’s brow wrinkled. It took him a few moments to answer. “I don’t - I want to say yes. But I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“I suppose not.”

They looked at each other for another second, before Quentin shifted onto his side, so that he was angled towards Eliot. “What would you miss most?” he asked.

Eliot answered honestly. “Fucking.”

Quentin huffed out a laugh. “Really?”

“Yeah. Can’t do it down there. Or - you can, I guess, but it’s less fun when the kink is mandatory.”

“Only you would stop the apocalypse because of sex,” said Quentin. “I don't get it.”

“What's not to get? Please don't make me explain BDSM.”

“How you can do it. Not in like - I understand why.  But their lives are so _short_. How are you not -?”

“Oh,” said Eliot. “A wreck?”

He barely stopped himself from making any pointed comparisons. Sometimes it was better to politely pretend that the can of worms didn't exist in the first place.

“Well, yeah.”

“I suppose,” said Eliot, gathering his thoughts. “Well. It's easier to sustain the level of energy required for emotional investment if it has an expiry date. It's basically impossible to hold onto it indefinitely. You may as well not even try.”

“So it’s basically meaningless for you,” said Quentin flatly.

“Well, it comes with the territory,” said Eliot. “Genetically speaking. It comes a lot easier to smite, etc, than sit around having feelings. You wouldn't get it, I guess. Plus my impulse control is bad.”

Quentin raised his eyebrows, looking dubious, but didn't say anything.

There was silence for a few seconds.

“It's not meaningless,” Eliot said. He'd meant to leave it at that, but - that's what he had meant about the impulse control. “I don’t know. These bodies - they’re so impermanent, built to disintegrate, in this awful world where hardly anything good ever happens to them, but they have this capacity for feeling - transcendent. If you do it right. I mean, maybe up in Heaven it’s just one long orgasm, I don't know. It's different for me.”

Quentin snorted. “It’s really not. Things haven’t changed that much since you - they haven’t changed.”

Eliot coughed and looked back up at the ceiling. “Anyway. Who’s the best lay you’ve had?”

“Eliot,” said Quentin.

“Come on. Don’t be so Victorian about it.”

“It’s private,” said Quentin primly.

“I still can’t believe you didn’t fuck that blonde,” said Eliot. “What about Julia?”

“Stop,” said Quentin. “We didn't - she's with Kady. Didn't you realise?”

“I got a vibe,” said Eliot. “Wasn't sure, though.”

“They have this complicated thing, there's this other guy, too - anyway. And Alice is - I wouldn't. She's going through a lot. Her brother died, and her parents - yeah.”

“Did you want to, though?”

“Drop it,” said Quentin, with enough bite that Eliot knew he meant it.

“So: best lay? I'll go first. Shakespeare.”

“No fucking way,” said Quentin. “No fucking way you fucked William Fucking Shakespeare.”

Eliot let a smug smile spread across his face. “Your turn.”

“No,” said Quentin, actually laughing now.

“Okay, I'll guess. Uh, Morrissey. Karl Marx. Anne Boleyn. Joan of Arc.”

There was a slightly embarrassed silence.

“Joan of _Arc_ ?” Eliot turned onto his side. Quentin's ears were red. “You _holdout_.”

“Can we please move on,” said Quentin hopelessly.

Eliot was laughing, and soon Quentin joined in, softly, so they wouldn't wake Anathema and Newt, or any other members of their wayward menagerie. It was hard to stop once they'd started, though, and Eliot found himself curling in on himself, leaning into Quentin's space. When he calmed down, he opened his eyes, and Quentin was right there, looking at him.

“Hey,” said Quentin, and kissed him.

Eliot went with it, of course he did, angling his head to give him better access. It was soft, barely there, and hard to deepen from the position they were in, curved together on their sides like parentheses. Quentin's hand came up to Eliot's cheek, then floated uncertainly down his side before taking Eliot's own hand and lacing their fingers together.

Something shifted inside Eliot at that, like he was a structurally compromised iceberg, and he made a soft noise and turned them over, so that he was hovering over Quentin and their hands, still wound together, were over his head. They stared at each other for a second before Eliot ducked his head back down to kiss him again, deeper this time, swiping his tongue into Quentin's mouth. Quentin moved so easily for Eliot, just at the suggestion of what Eliot wanted him to do. It was like stumbling upon the answer to a puzzle you thought you hadn't even begun to solve.

Quentin's other hand was in Eliot's hair, carding through it. Eliot hadn't brushed it in a few days, he thought abstractedly, it was probably knotted and more than a little grimy, but Quentin's hand was steady, guiding Eliot closer. Eliot didn't resist, pressed himself close, kissing Quentin slow and dirty. He didn't like to brag, but he knew he was good at it, and Quentin was so - not unpractised, but _reactive_ , like he'd never been really kissed before, like everything Eliot was doing was a surprise. With his other hand, he reached under the t-shirt Quentin had borrowed from Newt to slide up to where he could feel his heart beating doubletime, brushing his thumb across his nipple and smiling into Quentin's mouth when he inhaled, a little breathless with it. Eliot wanted to get as close as he could, fill up all the negative space between them; he wanted to take his time doing it. He wanted -

He broke off to press a kiss into the pressure point behind Quentin's ear, then his temple, then sat back.

Quentin's eyes opened slowly, like he was waking up.

“We should sleep,” said Eliot. His voice came out hoarse, and he cleared his throat. “Long day tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” said Quentin. “Uh, yeah. Makes sense.”

He blinked, looking a little dazed. Eliot looked away. He was still holding Quentin's hand, at a slightly awkward angle, now; he squeezed it tight, vicious, then let it go, turning onto his back and falling asleep straight away, out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

The next morning, he woke up in time to roll over and see Quentin do the same. It was still dark outside, the first tendrils of dawn barely struggling over the windowsill. They studied each other for a second.

“Eliot -” Quentin looked as though he'd rather be anywhere else. Eliot knew that face.

“We'd better go,” said Eliot. “We don't have much time.”

“Yeah.” He sat up, scrubbing his hand over his face, then looked down at Eliot, expression unreadable. “I guess so.”

It wasn't that it wasn't awkward, or strange - if Eliot thought about it, he couldn't look Quentin in the eye. But it was easy somehow to put it to one side, until with a little determination he could almost relegate the whole experience to the hazy realm of dream-memory. Quentin was acting the same as ever, so it was like it had never happened.

Besides, he supposed, they had bigger fish to fry. He wanted to confer with Quentin about the plan once they found Adam, but it was surprisingly hard to find a quiet minute where they could talk, even while Anathema and Newt were busy shutting up their various farmyard animals and getting the baby into the car seat and wrestling Dog into the back of Newt’s market day van.

It wasn't any easier once they were on the road, either, not least because Newt sang along to the stereo.

“Tonight!” he started to warble as they pulled out of the drive. “I'm gonna have myself! A real good time!”

Eliot soon learned, against his will, that _Best of Queen_ was almost exactly as long as the drive from Tadfield to London. They were on Radio Gaga when the houses along the road started to thicken, becoming squatter and dimmer and more uniform, and a Pret began to spring up every other street. London was a lot bigger than Eliot remembered it being.

“I should tell you,” said Anathema over her shoulder. Newt's drumming against the steering wheel quietened slightly. “I'm not sure how much Adam actually remembers about that summer. I'm sure he hasn't forgotten - I don't see how he could - but I've never talked to him about it. We try not to talk about it at all, to be honest.”

“Bit awkward to drop into conversation while you're trying to tutor the poor kid in A Level Physics,” agreed Newt.

“He wouldn't have forgotten,” said Eliot. “I don't know if he could. He's not human, remember.”

“Acts enough like one, though,” said Newt mildly. “Maybe it's not forgetting, just - compartmentalising. We're good at that.”

“Mm,” said Quentin, looking out of the window.

The drive was uneventful, if slow, apart from one alarmingly adrenaline-fuelled moment when the baby looked like it was going to throw up on Eliot's boots. It was almost midday by the time they pulled up outside Adam’s student accommodation.

Eliot, who had been staring firmly out of the window since accidentally making eye contact with Quentin when Freddie Mercury - and, by extension, Newt - had started crooning about finding somebody to love three songs ago, looked back at him again. “Ready?”

“As I'll ever be.”

He wasn't sure what he'd expected. The boy in the photograph had looked normal, to the human eye - there had just been something _additional_ about him.

He recognised the girl first - Pepper. She was taller, and her hair was slightly muted, but she stood in the exact same way, as though ready for a scrap. Then there was another girl, one he didn't recognise, sitting on a suitcase on the kerb next to her. By process of elimination, the boy - man, really - next to her was Adam.

He didn't look particularly as though he was plotting the downfall of mankind, though it was hard to tell behind his emo fringe. That was what Eliot registered first; then the denim jacket, then the heavy-looking hiking backpacks either side of him. And then it was there - the feeling of something extra, a lot subtler than it had been. Eliot wasn't sure if he'd have noticed if he hadn't been looking.

There was a commotion in the back. The second Newt pulled over, Anathema hurried to let Dog out. He leapt up on to Adam like a much younger puppy, barking an undignified high-pitched bark. Adam laughed and launched to the floor to wrestle with him. Anathema gave Eliot a look as he got out of the car, as if to say, you see? Does this look like the field commander of Satan’s army to you?

“Thanks again, Newt,” Pepper was saying, hoisting a stack of cardboard boxes into the van’s capacious trunk. “Mum’s lost her driver's licence again, so I really appreciate it. This is Plum, I don't think you met last time. My girlfriend,” she added, unnecessarily.

“Nice to meet you,” said the improbably named Plum, in an old-fashioned transatlantic accent that suggested an extremely expensive education from both sides of the pond.

“I thought we could all get lunch before we head home,” said Anathema.

“Who are you?” Adam stood up, Dog prostrate in adoration at his feet. He looked curiously at Eliot and Quentin. “Do I know you?”

“Not exactly,” temporised Eliot. Now that they were there, he understood how Anathema and Newt had managed not to talk about it for all those years. It was like trying to figure out how to bring an unsavoury relative or a slightly embarrassing skin condition up in casual conversation. In fact, both comparisons kind of applied.

“Lunch,” said Anathema firmly. “We can talk then.”

* * *

 

Eliot hadn't expected it to be easy, stopping the apocalypse, but he hadn't expected it to be this surreally slow, either. It was as though, he thought as they waited for someone to set up a highchair in Pizza Express, he and Quentin had arrived in England with all the urgency that the occasion demanded and had been immediately, firmly subsumed into the mundane rhythm of human life. In a way, it explained the previous night. There was only so long you could contemplate the end of everything before your mind forced you to think about things like lunch and personal drama instead to keep from losing it.

In the way of all recently-teens, the students had readily accepted Quentin and Eliot's presence in the face of more pressing issues, i.e. free food. Only Adam looked at them in faint puzzlement every now and then, whenever there was a lull in the conversation, which was mainly about all the kinds of tomato Newt had harvested recently. Quentin, incredibly, was deep in conversation with Plum about Fillory and Further.

After the waiter had brought their wine, and Eliot had poured himself a very generous helping, he raised his eyebrows at Anathema, who sighed.

“Alright,” she said. “Adam. I need to ask you something.”

Adam looked surprised, the words _who, me_? practically scrolling across his forehead. Eliot bet that if it had been five years ago, he would have come right out and said “I didn't do it.” It was just the wisdom that came with time, plus a large mouthful of garlic bread, that separated the reaction of the college student he was from the instinctively defensive local nuisance he had clearly once been.

“Well,” she said. “I suppose - do you know who these guys are?”

Adam frowned. Pepper put her glass down and said, “Aren't they part of your - holiday rental thing?”

“No, they - what?”

“You know,” said Pepper. “Every now and then these gay guys come and stay with you. I thought it was, like, a widening access thing.”

“What?” Anathema looked perplexed; Newt intrigued.

“Like, you take gay couples and you give them a weekend away in rural Oxfordshire,” continued Pepper, oblivious. “Like Escape to the Country, but with Airbnb. And gay.”

“Genius,” said Plum, looking smitten.

“Do you mean Aziraphale and Crowley?” asked Anathema blankly. “They're not - they're our friends. I suppose.”

Pepper sized her up. “Oh. I suppose I didn't think anyone in Tadfield had any gay friends. Apart from my friends.”

“Aziraphale and Crowley?” said Adam slowly. “I’ve met them, haven't I?”

“Well,” Anathema said. “Yes. It's all to do with it. You met them back when Newt and I first moved to the village, that summer.”

“I don't remember,” said Adam.

“Think about it,” said Anathema quietly.

Adam frowned.

“That was the year we got into the X-Men,” said Pepper authoritatively.

Adam shook his head before looking up at Eliot, who felt uncomfortably perceived. “No. That summer was different than the other years.”

“Not anymore,” said Eliot.

“Yes,” said Adam.

“I'm guessing you get who we are now,” said Quentin.

“I don't,” said Plum. “You're being very cryptic. Unless this is some kind of weird Tadfield thing.”

“I don't get it either, babe,” said Pepper.

“Maybe we should talk privately,” said Eliot.

Adam looked down the table. “They're my friends. They can stay.”

“Wow, thank you,” said Pepper. “So kind of you to let us keep eating our own lunch. I didn't realise that this Pizza Express was the, like, seat of your throne, or whatever.”

Adam grinned, a little wry. “Sort of.”

“Well, in that case,” said Eliot. “There isn't really a delicate way of saying this. Are you going to make the apocalypse happen, and if so, would you mind - not?”

There was a short silence.

“Is this a metaphor?” said Plum. “Is it, like, a sex thing?”

Quentin looked appalled. “We're not - _no._ You're a _child_.”

She rolled her eyes, but Adam spoke before she could say anything. “No.”

“No?”

“No.”

Eliot had known it, really. Adam didn't really look like he was emotionally volatile enough to explode the world.

“Can you stop it?”

Adam looked sorry. “I don't think so. It's - that summer, it all made sense. Now it's like I've lost half the puzzle pieces. I can barely remember how they all fit together.”

“Right,” said Eliot, suddenly feeling sick. It had all been for nothing, after all. They were back to square one, and the apocalypse was coming sooner than ever.

He looked around the table, at Quentin, then the others, as though he'd never seen any of them before. It was fucking ridiculous. There he was, in Pizza Express, with an angel, two lesbians, a witch, an amateur gardener, a baby, a hellhound, and an Antichrist (reformed). The waiter was coming to take their order. That was life, going on in its truly infinite variety, and soon it would all be over.

“What the fuck is happening?” he said, mainly rhetorically.

“You tell me,” said Pepper.

“Maybe we should,” said Anathema suddenly.

“No,” said Adam.

“Adam, you remember how it ended last time,” she said. “It took all of us. What have we got to lose, that we won't lose anyway, by telling your best friends?”

Adam looked torn. It must be hard for him, Eliot thought, dispassionately. Worse than being a demon, or an angel. He was a lot closer, and a lot further away, from being human. But Eliot couldn't bring himself to feel bad for him. He couldn't really bring himself to feel anything.

“How is involving them going to help?” said Quentin. “Eliot - we should go. We need to figure out our next steps. I think we're done here.”

“Hold on,” said Newt. “Agnes sent you here for a reason.”

This, unexpectedly, pushed Eliot over the edge.

“I have travelled halfway across the world because of a chinchilla,” he said. “I’m not going to sit here making polite conversation with the Antichrist because of a corpse called Agnes. Fuck this, I'm going home.”

“Eliot,” said Quentin sharply.

“Sorry, Q, I just -”

“Shut up,” said Quentin, standing up and grabbing Eliot's arm, jostling him to his feet. “Excuse us,” he added. The rest of the table watched them go with varying degrees of alarm, confusion, and interest. The waiter, hovering nearby, made a tactical retreat.

Quentin dragged him through the restaurant into an alcove in front of the bathrooms.

“Okay,” he said, letting go of Eliot. “What the fuck?”

“Look, we aren't going to win,” he said. “Why did I ever think we could? It's fucking stupid to even try and I am above stupid.”

“No, fuck you,” said Quentin. “You brought me into this. You're not - I was _fine_ , before this.”

“Please. You were a wreck,” said Eliot. There went the can of worms. “I should have learned it from you: getting involved just makes it worse.”

“Look,” said Quentin, teeth gritted. “We can stand here with our dicks in our hands talking about what we should and shouldn't have done. Actually - no, we can't, I don't want to. But we're here, now. We don't have time. You can't go home and forget about it.”

“I have an extremely well-stocked drinks cabinet that would like to argue otherwise,” said Eliot.

“Okay,” said Quentin. “That's great, until it happens. Maybe even after. Your side wins, everything's terrible. Great. But even if you were drunk for a million years, if you snorted all the coke in the world, that wouldn't even be a tiny fraction of the rest of your life. It's the _rest of eternity_. That's forever.”

“I know what eternity is,” said Eliot. Quentin ignored him.

“You asked me if that was what I wanted, and it's not. And I know it's not what you want either, so you can - can go in this bathroom, get over it, then come back out and finish this with me.”

He looked steelier than Eliot had ever seen him. It was kind of hot. He could admit that to himself now, when emotions were running high.

“I told you,” said Quentin, when Eliot made no reply. “You're not getting out of this that easy. It's too much of a cliché, El.”

He looked down at where he was still holding onto Eliot's arm and squeezed it, just to really drive the point home. You couldn't accuse Quentin of subtlety, Eliot thought with a sudden unexpected rush of fondness. Not when he really meant something.

“You can have five minutes,” Quentin said magnanimously, then did a weird little nod, turned abruptly on his heel, and left.

Which left Eliot to go in the bathroom and get over it. He went inside obediently and stood in front of the sink, looking in the mirror. There he was, instantly recognisable as himself. He looked pale, his hair was a bird's nest, and his clothes were actively grimy, but there was something inside him that looked at his body and identified it as his own.

He splashed some water on his face. It didn't do much to improve matters; really, all it achieved was making his face wet. It was just one of those things that people did that seemed like the right thing to do.

Eliot wasn't a person, no matter how much he felt like one. It wasn't that he had any obligation to the world; he just liked it better than the alternative.

It wouldn't be hard to sneak out of a back door. In fact, speaking generally, it would probably be the easiest option that Eliot had; the cleanest way of getting out of the whole thing. He could go home and knuckle down for a few hours, until it was all over. It would amount to the same thing in the end.

You didn't get a lot of big choices if you were immortal. Almost everything pretty much evened out somehow given enough time. Eliot had made one of those choices, once, a very long time ago, and the jury was still out on whether it had been the right one.

But it was the little things that really wore away at you, until you became whoever you were. Eliot could leave, and a million years from now, it might not matter. But that would mean walking out and hailing a taxi and getting to the airport, talking someone into giving him a plane ticket. It would mean getting home and choosing what he wanted for his last meal; calling Margo and invariably getting her voicemail. Knowing that somewhere along the line, Quentin had realised that Eliot had given up.

Out of all the options available to him, that was the one that seemed impossible. Maybe Quentin was right: it was a cliché to even think he had another option, the muscle memory of who he usually was, when it wasn't everything on the line.

He wasn't going to be that predictable. Maybe it was too petty to make the decision based on wanting to do the opposite of what he usually did, but then again, he was a demon. Petty was his thing.

It was slightly awkward, rejoining the table, but by then it transpired that Pepper and Plum had learned Adam's true identity, which kind of overshadowed Eliot's minor breakdown.

“I can't believe you made me forget,” Pepper said accusingly as Eliot sat down. Quentin shot a quick assessing look at him. Eliot grimaced wryly back.

“I didn't make you,” said Adam. “You just did. Brian and Wensley, too. And I didn't want things to change, just cos -”

“You're an idiot,” Pepper informed him. “Back me up, babe.”

“You're an idiot,” said Plum obligingly. “Honestly, Adam, if you think this is bad, try going to boarding school. Okay, puberty almost made you cause the apocalypse; at least you weren't a bitch about it.”

“Eliot, we ordered you pasta,” said Newt loudly.

“Thanks,” said Eliot. “But maybe Quentin was right. We should go.”

“No, wait,” said Anathema. “I know you don't want to hear it, but Agnes really does know what she's doing. I _wish_ I had the book here now.”

“Okay,” said Quentin suddenly. “If you're right, she predicted this, too. So if something happens right now, that's what we need. If it doesn't - well, maybe she had this one wrong.”

An expectant silence fell.

“Well, we tried,” said Eliot, when nothing happened. “Come on, Q.”

“Nothing’s happening because everything you need is already here,” said Anathema. “That must be it. Between us, we must have the answer.”

“That's very heartwarming,” said Eliot. “But maybe it's actually that it's insane to stake the future of the world on the word of someone who died five hundred years ago.”

Adam frowned at him. “Steady on.”

“Seems to me like nobody in America really knows what's going on,” remarked Pepper. “Seems to _me_ that the only people with first hand experience of the apocalypse, including me for example, are right here at this table.”

“Do speak up if you remember anything useful,” said Eliot pleasantly.

“Pepper was the reason it never happened,” said Adam reprovingly. “I didn't - anyone could have done what I did if they were me. It was just my friends who stopped it.”

“Aziraphale and Crowley would know,” said Plum. She looked riveted, greedy with it. It was kind of tactless, but then again, Eliot supposed it wasn't every day you stumbled into something like this. “Am I pronouncing that right? It sounds like they knew what was going on.”

“We could find them,” said Quentin, looking at Eliot. “They have the prophecies, anyway.”

“No,” said Anathema. “That's a waste of time. If they don't want to be found, they won't be. But - logistically, right, if there's another one out there, there must have been another Crowley, mustn't there? Someone to make sure the baby was adopted into a good family? Or, well. You know.”

“Two Crowleys, two babies,” said Newt cryptically. “For my money, you'd have a failsafe. Seems like a lot of responsibility to put on one kid’s shoulders.”

Eliot stared at him. “You're saying that it happened at the same time. The swap. That there were two of them.”

“There _were_ two of them,” said Anathema. “There were three of them.”

“Yeah,” said Adam slowly. “Me. Greasy Johnson. And the other one - in America.”

“Wouldn't put it past Greasy Johnson,” said Pepper speculatively. “He’s been AWOL recently.”

“No, he's on his gap year working in John Lewis in Chelmsford,” said Adam dismissively. “His auntie lives there.”

“How did you know that?” said Quentin, leaning forward. “Maybe you can - I don't know, sense him.”

“What, like Spiderman?” said Adam. “Nah, I just know cos my mum does Pilates with his mum.”

“Adam was supposed to be the American one,” said Anathema. “Crowley told me that. He was supposed to be the American cultural attaché's kid. I suppose the other one was supposed to be Baby Young.”

“I’ve met him,” said Plum unexpectedly. “The cultural attaché. My dad works for the government and he used to take me to work sometimes. He has two kids, I think.”

Eliot looked at Quentin, who shrugged. “It would make sense. Politically, I mean.”

“They have an apartment in Manhattan but obviously the kids are probably grown up by now,” said Plum. “I got the feeling they would’ve emancipated themselves if it wouldn't bring shame upon the family name or whatever. But you might as well start there, right?”

Quentin raised his eyebrows at Eliot. “If you were going home, anyway -”

“I'm not,” said Eliot. “Well, I am now. But I wouldn't have.”

Quentin nodded.

“What's this guy called, anyway?” said Eliot, looking away.

“His name's Daniel,” said Plum. “Daniel Quinn.”

“What?” said Quentin.

* * *

 

They drove to the airport en masse, Newt’s van practically bulging at the corners. Eliot would rather have taken a cab, but he figured that it would be easier to talk the airline staff into giving them flight tickets if they had the Antichrist on their side.

Eliot thought Quentin was in shock. He was certainly quieter than usual, sitting between Pepper and Adam with the baby on Adam’s lap, but Eliot was sitting in front of him, so it was hard to see what was going on without being obvious about it. Eliot kind of regretted needling him so much, but a small devilish part of his brain had to admit that it was almost funnier now that she was the Antichrist. He decided not to bring it up.

Adam may not have had the full extent of his Antichrist powers anymore, but he was eerily persuasive for a college student. It was something to do with the way he straightened up and peered through his fringe; it turned him instantly from probable stoner to Good Kid. It took him less than five minutes of sweet-talking for him to get Eliot and Quentin onto the next flight from Heathrow out to New York.

Saying goodbye was strangely poignant. Anathema hugged them both, biting her lip as she stepped away, and Newt told them, quite emotionally, to take care of each other. Pepper and Plum were holding hands as they went through the gate.

They were all worried, Eliot realised. Of course they were. They liked their lives too.

Just before they turned the corner, he looked back at Adam, who nodded seriously at him. It was stupid, but it filled Eliot with some confidence.

And then they were back on Eliot’s second long-haul flight in as many days. He really hated the apocalypse.

Once they were belted in, he opened his mouth.

“Don't ask me if we had sex,” said Quentin.

“I wasn't gonna,” said Eliot. He studied Quentin, who was looking fixedly ahead. “Are you okay?”

“Fine.”

Eliot waited.

“I just - I don't know how I didn't realise,” Quentin said, a moment later. “She was _right there_.”

“I didn't either,” pointed out Eliot fairly.

“You saw her for like five seconds. I was practically living on top of her.”

Eliot restrained himself. “You didn't exactly expect it. She doesn't look much like the destroyer of worlds.”

“Was I being a misogynist?” Quentin asked tragically. “What if I thought she couldn't be the Antichrist because she's a girl? What if I let my - feelings -”

“I _knew_ _it_ ,” said Eliot, tactlessly. Quentin glared at him. “Okay, sorry. Look, you're an angel. It's probably too late to start worrying about upholding patriarchal systems.”

This did not seem to improve Quentin's mood.

“It doesn't sound like she's the source of all evil,” said Eliot as a peace offering. “You wouldn't have been her friend if she was.”

“It's the opposite,” said Quentin. “I think she just really wants to help everyone. It's - she hasn't had the easiest life. I'm not making excuses.”

“She's the Antichrist,” said Eliot. “She doesn't need an excuse. She just is.”

“But that's the thing,” said Quentin. “Adam proves it. You don't have to be whatever it is. You have a choice.” He paused. “Not you specifically, just - you know.”

“Let's hope so,” said Eliot. “The upshot of you knowing her is at least you might be able to talk her down.”

Quentin considered this. “Maybe. I don't know.”

“There has to be a reason why it's us doing this,” said Eliot. “Maybe that's it.”

“You think this is part of the plan?”

“Everything is, right? It's probably blasphemous - whatever the opposite of blasphemous is - for me to say so, but surely if it's really ineffable, it has to be?”

“I don't know,” said Quentin. “It doesn't feel like there's any real intent behind this. I mean, have you heard from your people?”

“Not for about twenty years.”

Quentin raised his eyebrows.

“What,” said Eliot. “You think they're - gone?” He considered it for a second, before deciding he didn't have the energy to think about the implications. “I’m pretty sure I just irritated them into leaving me alone. And why would it be happening now, anyway?”

“Like Newt said. She's the failsafe.”

“Yeah, or maybe Adam was just the dress rehearsal. Maybe this time they're really going to break out the spangles and jazz squares.”

“You would have heard about this if was serious. It's your territory.”

“Please,” said Eliot. “They don't trust me with garden-variety corruptions anymore. It's probably one of the others - not Margo, she would have told me. Maybe Poppy.”

Quentin, who’d met Poppy once in a speakeasy during Prohibition with hilarious, disastrous results, made a face.

“Exactly.”

There were still nine hours to go. Eliot wished that Adam's Antichrist powers could have at least stretched enough to get them business class.

“Here,” said Quentin. He held out one half of his headphones.

Eliot glanced down at it, and was inconveniently ambushed with a fragment of memory from the previous night: Quentin's hand in his hair, his eyes wide and dark, their breath absurdly loud in the quiet room.  

“I'm, uh,” he said, before clearing his throat. “I think the Lord of the Rings is beyond me right now, no matter how pretty Orlando Bloom is. The stakes are too high, it's very close to home.”

“We can watch whatever,” said Quentin, sounding uncertain.

In all their years of knowing each other, this was a first. Quentin was hopeless in many ways, and Eliot had a lot of unasked-for editorial suggestions for him most of the time, but Quentin had never really asked him for anything before, as though Eliot could say no.

It was a high-stress situation. Eliot was unsurprised, when he thought about it. Things had been difficult for Quentin to start with, and now - he wasn't surprised that he wanted company, even if it was just about watching movies. Even if Eliot was all there was.

“Okay,” he said. “But I'm warning you: I have a feeling that the only movies I can handle right now are going to star Drew Barrymore.”

It wasn't so bad, eating vacuum packed breadsticks and watching 50 First Dates together on the eve of the apocalypse. Adam Sandler's career had been one of Eliot's little victories back in the day. He could almost forget they were 50,000 feet above the ground, and that soon there would be no ground to speak of.

They had barely touched down when Quentin grabbed Eliot’s arm and they disappeared, rematerialising in his apartment in downtown Boston. It was much smaller than Eliot’s - barely two and a half rooms - but surprisingly homely, the walls packed with chaotic-looking bookshelves. Eliot could see at least twenty Fillory books in that first glance alone.

There were dirty dishes in the sink, and the bed hadn’t been made. Eliot felt like he was intruding, somehow. He made his way over to the window to look outside: it was another grey day, with ominous stormclouds amassing above.

“She lives downstairs,” said Quentin. He pressed a few buttons on his - an actual landline, Eliot hadn’t seen one of those in years - and put it on speaker.

“The chinchilla exploded,” said Kady, her voice tinny and abrupt. “But it made it pretty clear that it’s Boston. Hopefully you get this in time. We’re about to head up now.”

“Okay,” said Quentin, mostly to himself. “We should go.”

“Q,” said Eliot, and nodded to the window. Outside, the skies had opened. The air looked - green. “Gruesome toad massacre alert.”

“It’s starting,” said Quentin. They watched the sky for a moment, before Quentin went over to a wardrobe, grabbing a fresh hoodie and two umbrellas, one of which he tossed to Eliot. “Let's go. We'll try her apartment first.”

But when they got downstairs, the door was ajar. Quentin pushed it open.

“Hello?”

No response.

Eliot strode forward, checking all the rooms. They were all empty. It looked as though Alice had left recently, in a hurry; cupboards were open, spilling out clothes, a half-drunk cup of coffee sat on the side, and her phone was still plugged in. Quentin turned off the gas.

“Obviously it couldn't be that easy,” said Eliot, coming back into the kitchen. “Okay, where now?”

Quentin scrubbed a hand across his face. “Uh. Campus. The library, the river. She works at a bookstore.”

“Of course she does,” said Eliot. “Where first?”

“Maybe we should split up.”

“No,” said Eliot immediately. “Stupid idea, never works.”

“Eliot, it's started. We haven't got time.”

“What would I even say to her?” he demanded. “‘Hi, nice to meet you, you don't know me but we have a mutual make-out partner, sorry but would you mind not raining devastation down upon the earth?’”

Quentin looked like he needed to take a few deep breaths. “You don't have to say anything to her. Just find her, call me, then I'll talk to her. Or I might find her.”

“Stop being such a fucking hero about it,” said Eliot. There was something bizarrely galling about Quentin’s competence. Maybe it was because now that it was actually happening, Eliot felt like he’d lost some vital momentum, as though he’d run aground there in Alice’s kitchen. “You’re - it never _works_.”

Quentin’s face softened. “It’s the apocalypse, El. I’m pretty sure that if we were ever gonna be heroes, the time is now.”

Eliot could not overstate how unheroic he felt. “We are so unqualified to do this. We don't know what the fuck we're doing. I take it back, no plan would ever be this stupid. Not even an ineffable one.”

“Yeah,” said Quentin. “But what else is new? Look: I'll take the library and campus. You try the bookstore and the river. Call me if you find her, or even if - just call me.”

“I haven't got a phone,” said Eliot. “I left mine - I don't know. It must be in New York somewhere.”

“Take hers,” said Quentin, unplugging it and holding it out for Eliot.

Eliot stared down at it. “Q -”

“Just take it, El,” said Quentin gently. “I'll see you.”

Eliot took it, nodding jerkily. Quentin shrugged on his hoodie and tucked his hair behind his ears.

Then there was a confused moment where Eliot wasn't quite sure exactly what he was doing, and suddenly they were kissing. He had Quentin's face in his hands like they were in a Disney Channel original movie, their mouths slanting warmly together and his thumb resting delicately on Quentin's cheekbone. Eliot felt like he was in his body but simultaneously not in it at all, like for the first time in six thousand years it was unfamiliar to him. A small part of his brain was running its mouth, yelling all the things Eliot usually tried to avoid thinking; he ignored it, but he had a feeling that some of it got through anyway. Quentin's hands tightened on Eliot's shirt.

It was a real, sappy, Nicholas Sparks kiss, the sort he’d never pictured as the last kiss he’d ever have. He tried to make it a little nasty, nipping Quentin’s lip, but he couldn’t muster the heat to keep it up and it just turned sweet, close, Quentin’s nose a little cold against Eliot’s skin.

Quentin was a breath away when they broke apart, Eliot’s hand still in his hair, keeping it off his face. Eliot looked down at him and tried to fight off the urge to turn ironic. It was hard to break the habit of a lifetime, but it seemed like if there was ever a time that Eliot was going to be sincere, it would have to be now. Quentin was looking back, trying to suppress a smile.

“What?” said Eliot, a little self-conscious.

“Nothing,” said Quentin, failing to tamp it down. He unclenched his hand and pushed him gently away. “Just - you. Come on, time to go.”

“ _Wh_ _at_ ,” Eliot said again, but Quentin had gone. The following moment, so had Eliot.

* * *

 

He'd had to snoop through Alice’s phone to find out which bookstore, but he got there eventually and, after fending off an overenthusiastic sales assistant, found out she hadn't turned up for her shift. Then he went to the river, where he realised that the term “riverside” could actually apply to a pretty long stretch of land. When he tried calling Quentin to narrow it down, it went straight to voicemail, which was another thing he could add to the list of things he was silently freaking out about.

He was morosely contemplating his ruined loafers when he heard his name.

Amazingly, it was Kady and Julia. They looked much better dressed for the occasion than he did, which was something he rarely admitted.

“How did you find me?” he said when they got close enough.

Julia held out his phone. “Locator spell.”

“Ugh,” he said, rote, then, “Have you seen Quentin?”

They exchanged a look.

“I thought he was with you?” said Kady suspiciously.

“We split up. It's fine, probably. I'm sure it's fine.”

“What's going on?” said Julia. He filled them in as briefly as he could, which still took a good ten minutes. By the time he wound up, they were walking towards a dead end.

“She's not here,” he said, glancing at his phone. Still nothing from Quentin. “We should head to the campus. So what have you been up to? Please tell me you found some kind of Chekhov's gun that can put us all out of our misery.”

“We've been looking into the Horsemen,” said Julia. “It's - weird.”

“Four of them,” said Eliot absently, looking up exactly where the campus was. “Death, War, Famine, and - the other one. I forget which.”

“Pestilence,” Julia said. “Or Pollution, it's not very clear.”

“Wow,” said Eliot. “Good PR for Greenpeace. You should tell Quentin that, it'll really get him started.”

“You need the Horsemen as well as the Antichrist, apparently,” said Kady. “Last time there was an uptick in disasters leading up to the actual event - civil wars breaking out, oil spills. This time, nothing.”

“So?” said Eliot. “Okay, hold on.”

He grabbed their arms. A second later, they were on the quad.

“Whoa,” said Kady, stumbling. “Some fucking warning next time, dude.”

“Sorry,” said Eliot, not meaning it. He dialled Quentin again. “What were you saying?”

“We don't know what it means,” Julia said. “But - if there's an apocalypse, they'll be there. We've made provisions.”

Quentin still wasn't picking up. Eliot gritted his teeth against the panic that was starting to rise in his chest. “Okay, fine. Great. But do you know where they actually fucking are?”

“Uh,” said Kady. “Actually, yeah.”

Eliot followed her gaze. She was looking at the Boston skyline, which seemed normal enough, except for -

“Well, shit,” he said.

Then they were on the riverside, with the water rising drunkenly a good thirty feet above their heads.

They had the right place this time. Alice was in the middle of the river, the water at her back, and Quentin was in front of her, hands out placatingly. Eliot, Kady, and Julia were up on the riverbank, too far away to hear what they were saying, but the sound of raised voices travelled.

The weather was starting to get freaky. The toads had stopped a while ago but the sky was taking on a distinctly red tinge, and wind was whipping through the air; Kady made an exasperated sound and tied her hair back.

Eliot moved forward, but Julia held him back. “Hold on.”

“Why?” said Eliot incredulously.

She looked past him. “They're here.”

They weren't on horseback, which Eliot considered false advertising. They were just standing there. It was unmistakable who they were, which was strange, because of who they were.

“Hi, baby,” said Margo. She looked incredible, Eliot had to give her that. She was in killer heels and wearing a long, dark, halterneck dress, with a slit running right up the thigh. On her back were two deadly-looking axes. Eliot knew without knowing how he knew that if he got close enough to tell, her old smell - dark and musky, like frankincense - would be gone, and in its place would be gunpowder.

“Hey, Bambi,” he said. “I guess this is why you didn't pick up.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I tried to tell you as much as I could. I had a gag order. Not the fun kind, either.”

“It's good to see you,” said Eliot, honestly. “Even if the circumstances could have been better.”

“Hey, you too, man,” said Josh Hoberman  - Midwest, Eliot had swapped regions with him, way back when. He was holding a Cuisinart kitchen scale under one arm.

“I didn't mean you,” Eliot told him. “Was every single demon in North America invited apart from me?”

“You don't want to be involved,” Poppy advised.  “I'm never going to get this gunk out of my hair. And it wasn't everyone else. Todd isn't here.”

“Please don't talk about Todd like we're the same,” said Eliot, pained. “And who are you?”

The final Horseman - not Horseman, regular man, whatever - scowled. “Who the fuck are _you_?”

“Penny?” Kady came out from behind Eliot. “What -?”

“Kady,” he said. “What is _happening_?”

“The apocalypse,” said Julia.

“Jules,” said Kady, calmly. “Did we _bang Death_?”

“I think they're stand-ins,” said Julia. “Placeholders. I think we’d have noticed if, uh -”

“Well, a crazy lady bequeathed me these,” said Margo, pointing at her axes. “In a dream, like I'm Mary Mother of fucking God or something. It was all mystical and shit, and I'm not gonna lie, it kinda turned me on. So for all intents and purposes, right now, we're the real deal. So I'm gonna have to ask you to step aside.”

“Margo,” said Eliot.

“I'm sorry, El,” she said. “But I've got a job. We don't have a choice.”

Eliot glanced sideways, at where Quentin and Alice were still - talking, or fighting, or whatever it was that they were doing. Margo watched him.

“Go get your boy,” she said, gently. “Then you guys should probably go. I don't want you to be hurt, El.”

The wall of water wavered alarmingly.

“For fuck’s sake,” said Eliot, and scrambled down the bank.

Neither of them noticed until Eliot was right on top of them, at which point Alice jumped almost out of her skin, sending some of the water splashing down onto them.

“Eliot, get away,” said Quentin tightly.

“Who are you?” said Alice. “Wait, hold on. Don't tell me, I already know.”

Her voice was high, almost breaking, with a faintly hysterical note to it, like she couldn't quite believe that any of this was actually happening. Eliot could relate.

“Everything okay?” he said. “Not to panic anyone, but we've got company.”

The Horsemen were drawing closer, taking their time about it. It was strange, watching them walk along the drained riverbed. It was mostly gravel and mud, with a few startled plants flopped over at intervals; the topography of an alien planet. Then again, Eliot felt so far away from the rest of the world that they may as well have been on one.

“That’s Penny,” said Quentin, distracted. “What the fuck?”

“I didn't even get the actual Horsemen,” said Alice blankly. “Last time had the actual Horsemen.”

“Horsepeople,” said Quentin automatically.

Alice rolled her eyes so hard that Eliot's ached in sympathy. “Whatever. The point is, I'm the goddamn Antichrist, and I'm still the backup plan. How is that fucking fair, Quentin?”

“It's not,” said Quentin hastily. “Look, Alice, I get it, it's not fair. You don't have to tell me that. But it's what we have.”

“Not if - I could make it better,” she said. “I can feel it. It wouldn't be hard. It would be so much better, Q. To have a world with ice caps, and - and blue whales, and where nobody ruins their lives by making stupid _fucking_ choices -” She was almost crying, holding back tears with a fierce glare.

The Horsemen had almost reached them. Their shadows were morphing, turning much bigger than was plausible for where the sun was in the now blood-red sky. If Eliot looked close, he could have sworn they had faces.

“You can't stop people making choices,” he said. “Free will is kind of key to people being people.”

“Yeah, and Alice, you're not - it's not just the shitty stuff, okay? People choose to do good things too.” Quentin looked over at Eliot, who busied himself looking in the opposite direction. “That's the hard thing. That's the only way out. I swear to you.”

“Yeah, but I'm not a person,” said Alice. “That's kind of the point.”

“Bullshit,” said Quentin. “Look, I've been here a long time, so I know. This world is unfair. You're right. It sucks, and it takes everything out of you, and living in it turns you into whoever you are. Not anything else that someone decided for you.”

Eliot swallowed. It felt undignified to feel so personally targeted by the apocalypse. Especially when the apocalypse sounded like an after-school special.

“Whatever it is,” said Quentin, gently. “You can fix it. But not like this.”

Alice still wasn't crying, which Eliot thought was admirable. She didn't let down the water, though, and the wind was still as strong as ever, so Eliot knew it wasn't over.

Then Julia was there, pressing a steak knife into Eliot's hand.

“It's not as cool, but it's all we could find,” she said. She was wearing a crown, the sparkly plastic kind that little girls wore to their birthday parties. A few feet away, Kady was handing Quentin an actual fucking scythe ( _witches_ , thought Eliot scathingly somewhere in the back of his mind, of _course_ they had a scythe just lying around, this was why he didn't fuck with them), a set of old-fashioned cooking scales held in the crook of her arm.

They were facing the Horsemen now, lined up like they were a really terrible version of the Avengers, with Alice caught in the middle. In terms of - weapons, or symbols, or whatever the objects were - they were pretty well matched, Eliot thought, but something weird was happening to the Horsemen. Their features were morphing: Margo’s familiar, dear face had been taken over by an expression not entirely hers, and her hair looked distinctly red. It was hard to look away from them, and hard to look too long at the same time. Eliot straightened up, trying to look a little more on top of his shit. He glanced at Quentin, who was staring steadfastly at Alice, holding the scythe carefully in front of him like he was about to go ham on a wheat field.

Alice surveyed them for a few long moments, before her gaze turned inward in some inexplicable way.

“Can you hear that?” she asked abruptly.

They all listened. There was the wind, and the water was making a muted roaring sound, but -

“Hear what?” said Eliot.

Alice smiled tightly. “Exactly.”

A few drops of rain fell on his head. Eliot hoped fervently it wasn't actually blood. He chanced a look upwards to see.

It wasn't blood, or even rain. He moved unthinkingly towards Quentin, grabbing Julia's wrist and pulling her along with him, but as he reached out he knew it was too late to even Disapparate away. In the split-second as the water crashed down about them, they locked eyes as Quentin turned slightly backwards, and Eliot thought with a wry pang _, if the world wasn't ending right now I'd make a joke about your nerd vocabulary infiltrating my thought patterns._

Then they were gone.

* * *

 

Eliot woke up in his apartment.

It was probably around midday, judging by the light that was streaming through the window. He craned his neck: there was the bottle of tequila, abandoned sloppily with a pair of shot glasses in the middle of the floor next to most of his clothes. He could hear someone in his kitchen.

A second later, Margo came in, wearing an oversized shirt and holding a steaming mug of coffee. They looked at each other for a second.

“Shit,” said Eliot, hit with an awful swoop of realisation, and disappeared.

The river was back to being a river. The sky was a more normal shade of grey, and any traces of dead toads had all vanished into thin air, as had the other Horsemen. As had Alice and Quentin.

The world was still spinning, but Eliot was at a loss. He hovered uselessly on the bank for a while, scanning the water in case something were to implausibly emerge from it. When nothing did, he checked Quentin's apartment, then Alice's, then the stretch of pavement where he'd found Quentin handing out flyers. He went to the safe house, where Julia and Kady were nowhere to be found, and in a moment of lightheadedness he tried the airport, before checking Quentin's apartment again.

An hour later, he went home.

Margo looked up from where she was curled up on his sofa, scrolling through Twitter. There was an open bottle of wine and two glasses on the coffee table in front of her. He felt a pang of deja vu so strong it was like physically travelling back in time - except he was pretty sure he’d actually just travelled back in time and it was so uneventful that he wasn’t totally certain that any of it had happened at all.

“Hey.”

He collapsed next to her. “Okay. So here’s what I'm thinking. Either we did something incredibly hallucinatory yesterday without me realising, or I've officially lost it.”

Margo looked over at him.

“Or…”

“Or,” she agreed, face twisting. “El -”

“It's fine,” he said, realising with some surprise that he meant it.  “I get it. Free will isn't a perk of the job. You didn't have a choice.”

“I could feel her in my _head_ ,” said Margo. “She wasn’t exactly offering fashion tips.”

“You don’t need fashion tips,” said Eliot loyally.

“She was just hanging back until the end. I think she wanted to see what would happen. Then it was full on The Exorcist, me screaming behind a glass window, the works. It was such a fucking HR violation.” She put her feet in Eliot’s lap. “I missed you, you know. It wasn't any fun being on opposite sides. Fill me in on what's been happening with you.”

“Drink first,” said Eliot decisively. “It's a long story.”

By the time he was done, they were well into their second bottle.

“And now,” he said as Margo topped them up with the remnants. “It's game over. Everything is back to how it was.”

Margo eyed him. “That's a good thing, right?”

“Yeah, of course,” said Eliot immediately. “I mean, I don't know what I expected. Maybe it was just kind of anticlimactic.”

“We should go out,” said Margo, which wasn't what he'd been expecting her to say, but also not surprising. “Maybe the end of the world never happened but I resent the fact that we never got to see it out in style.”

He smiled at her. “Margo and Eliot style.”

“Exactly. Drink up, bitch: let's find something to wear.”

The thing about going out as a demon in New York was that you got in free to any club, no questions asked. The other thing about going out as a demon in New York was that your drinks were all free too, and it was very good, and Eliot was having a great time, and thank fuck the world hadn't ended yesterday. Next week. Whenever.

He and Margo danced together for a long time, until he'd reached that dizzying, perfect high where all the drinks were shots of pure euphoria and all the songs were ones he knew the words to. At some point he started to lose track of her, but it was fine, because by then he'd lost himself to the moment, like there was something fundamentally one about all the other dancers in the room, and it was that they were part of the same heartbeat, emanating from somewhere at the heart of the club, rhythmic and transcendent and still going.

In other words, he was fucked. But that was fine too.

Distantly, he recognised he was probably coming out of a kind of state of shock. The part of his brain that thought it was thinking logically couldn't stop thinking about the past - next - whatever - week, but he kept getting stuck on how far away it felt. It was like a movie he'd once watched, he thought vaguely, or a dream he'd had. If he didn't know better he'd swear it never actually happened.

He tried not to think about it too much, but he didn't quite have full control over all of his thoughts, so as well as the low-level hum of his subconscious cataloguing everything that had happened, every now and then a memory surfaced with surprising vividness: the pollen smell of Anathema’s home, the slight spray on his face from the water of the Charles River, the press of Quentin's knee against his, 50,000 feet above sea level. Every time it did, he shut his eyes and told himself firmly to get a handle on it.

Margo disappeared for good at around 1am with a guy who looked like Chadwick Boseman, catching Eliot's eyes across the room as she headed out with a slight questioning look. He blew her a kiss; he wasn't ready to head home yet, and he was fine where he was. It was very Margo to deal with the emotional fallout of a stressful situation by fucking it out.

He was starting to have a few thoughts in a similar direction when the memories started to make themselves increasingly, irritatingly known.

“What’s wrong?” said the guy he'd been enjoying a pleasant drunken make-out with, breaking off. His hands were squarely in Eliot's back pockets; it was very nice. Eliot thought, regretfully, that he looked extremely flexible.

“You just made me think of someone else,” he said.

“Bummer,” said the guy, extricating his hands. “Well, see you.”

It was pretty much downhill from there. Eliot was okay with that. It had been a long time since he'd showered, after all, and he hadn't really slept in his own bed for a while. He left the club and walked home, the cold autumn air shocking him into partial sobriety.

As soon as he got in, he shucked off all his clothes and got straight in the shower, where he spent a blissful half hour not thinking about anything at all. Decent water pressure was worth saving the world for. When he got out, he wrapped himself in his dressing gown, still a little buzzed and looking forward to passing out.

The knock on the door was so quiet he almost missed it, but as soon as he heard it, his head snapped up. Margo had a key and he'd never even seen his neighbours before, so -

He almost tripped over himself pulling the door open. Quentin was standing there, looking exhausted.

“Hey,” he said. “Can I come in?”

“Oh - yeah,” said Eliot. “Of course. It's a tip, sorry. Do you want - a drink, anything?”

“I’m okay,” said Quentin, following Eliot inside. It was intensely weird to have him there, in Eliot's space, which belonged so much to the person Eliot had been before the apocalypse. Eliot had pretty much thought that everything would either end forever, or go exactly back to how it had been before, but Quentin standing there, sockfooted and lost-looking, didn't fit either.

They sat down next to each other on the sofa, oddly formal. Eliot looked at Quentin out of the corner of his eye. He was staring at the tasteful abstract painting Eliot had in place of a fire. After a second, he went limp, like someone had removed his spine, and he slumped down, sliding onto the floor.

“Mmhmm,” agreed Eliot, and joined him. They sat looking at the wall for a second.

“I'm sorry I -”

“I went looking -”

Quentin’s lips quirked up. “You go.”

“No, I just - looked for you.”

“Yeah. I was with Alice. She had questions.”

Eliot bet she did. “Understandable. Is she -?”

“Fine, I think,” said Quentin. “And not - I think it's done now. For good.”

“She won't feel the urge to squash all human existence back into a lump of play-doh the next time she gets a B?” It was weird even talking about it, like exercising a muscle that he hadn’t used in a long time. It had only been yesterday, but it felt like a lot longer ago, and simultaneously like it hadn’t finished at all.

Quentin looked slightly disapproving. “She says not, and I believe her.”

“Well, here's hoping.” A knot he hadn't realised was there loosened in Eliot's chest. “What changed her mind, anyway? I kind of lost track of what was happening towards the end.”

“Nothing happened,” said Quentin. “Literally, I mean, nothing happened. Remember what Anathema said it was like when it happened with Adam? It wasn't just them.”

“Beelzebub?” said Eliot. He didn't really like using the name. “And Megatron?”

“ _Metatron_ ,” said Quentin. “Yeah. They didn't send anyone this time. And everything that happened with the Horsepeople was weird, wasn't it?”

“Yeah,” said Eliot, and described everything Margo had told him. When he finished, Quentin was sitting back, looking thoughtful.

“I think they never really meant it,” he said. “Like, they did, clearly, but not like Adam. I think it was a test. They didn't invest everything in it this time”

“They wanted to see what would happen,” said Eliot, remembering.

“Yeah,” said Quentin. “Hey, is that drink still going?”

“Sure,” said Eliot, and got up. “So you’ve been with Alice this whole time?”

“For a couple hours,” said Quentin. “Then I went for a walk. Plus I missed my shift at the community centre today so I went to make up the hours.”

Eliot grinned reflexively into his glassware cupboard. “Back to normality, right?”

“Yeah.” Quentin’s voice was weirdly quiet, but Eliot was too busy pouring bourbon to look. He didn’t usually love it, but it felt appropriate. “Eliot?”

“Mmm?” He turned, drinks in hand. Quentin was standing behind him, looking unsure. “What?”

“Just -” He visibly struggled, then gave up, before squaring his jaw and stepping determinedly closer, until he was so close that their feet were touching, making resolute eye contact all the while.

Eliot stared at him. “Oh.”

Quentin looked at him. Eliot was pretty sure his teeth were gritted. It was so familiar, that look: Quentin digging in his heels, ready to wait out whatever it was that he was squaring up to. In this case, apparently, Eliot.

“Let's not - I don't think we should forget about it,” he said. “It was important.”

“Who's forgetting?” said Eliot faintly. “Not me. I'm scarred for life.”

“Not that,” said Quentin. “Not just that, anyway.”

“Q -”

“I like you,” said Quentin. Despite the stubborn jut of his chin, there was something open in his face, that stupid trusting thing that Eliot _knew_ had always worked out badly before. “So sue me. I know it's not - orthodox, whatever, but if there was ever a time when all that bullshit didn't matter, it's now, right? I don't care if you don't.”

“Check yes or no?” said Eliot, aiming for dry to buy himself some more time. Unexpectedly, he felt a surge of irritation. He wasn't equipped to deal with - whatever it was Quentin was offering him, with so much trust, as though he didn't see any reason why it wouldn't work. He couldn't do it at the best of times. And if he couldn't do it now, then -

Quentin shot him a look. Eliot sighed, and put the glasses down. “It’s not that I don’t want to, believe me.”

“I know that,” said Quentin. “I mean, I got the picture before.”

Eliot tried not to think about how obvious he'd apparently been. It was difficult when Quentin was right _there_.

“Things have changed,” he said. “We're no longer at imminent risk of - vaporisation, or whatever. That changes things, Q.”

“Is this about your stupid expiry date bullshit?” Quentin mainly looked pissed off now, which was easier to handle. His hair was falling in his face again.

“Look, it’s bullshit to you, but it’s gotten me through six thousand years,” said Eliot, trying not to be distracted. “And who fucking knows how much longer we’re going to be here? I don’t - it’s a bad idea.”

“I’m not saying we should get married,” said Quentin. “Just - we can see where it goes.”

“The odds are a million to one that it’ll end extremely badly,” said Eliot. “We’re _immortal_ , Q. We can get over it, yeah, but this is going to stick with us forever. I’m a fucking demon. And you’re an angel, so - the stars aren’t exactly aligned.”

Quentin rolled his eyes. “Did the moral lesson of this whole nightmare not hit you over the head enough?”

“Please don’t tell me it’s our choices who make us who we really are,” said Eliot.

“Okay, but isn’t it?” said Quentin. “Aren’t they, I mean?”

Eliot hated this Lifetime movie bullshit. “You think we can, what, retire? I’m pretty sure we’re in this til we die, which - spoiler alert - isn’t happening any time soon. And it’s not like we can - can _coexist_ , not like this.”

“Why not?” said Quentin. “Look - why not? What we do - it’s not who we _are_.”

“It quite literally is,” said Eliot. “I mean, my best friend just got possessed by the spirit of war, that feels pretty fucking personal. We're in this for life. You can change all you want, be my guest, but deep down it won't stick.”

“That’s not true,” said Quentin. “You did before.”

“That was different,” said Eliot. They were still standing uncomfortably close. Quentin looked like he was about to jab Eliot in the chest with his finger to illustrate his point. Eliot moved subtly backwards. “Plus, it wasn’t like that was the decision of the century. It just kind of - happened.”

“It doesn’t make you who you are,” said Quentin stubbornly. “And besides, they manage okay over in England.”

Eliot grimaced. “They’ve practically adopted a witch over in England, they’ve clearly gone native.”

“As if you haven’t,” said Quentin. “As if _we_ haven’t. That was the whole point.”

“The point was that everything should go back to normal,” said Eliot. “And it has. It’s not - look, I told you, it’s not that I don’t want to.” He paused, then continued reluctantly. “Or that it didn’t mean anything, before. That's why - I just think we need to be careful about what happens next. I don't want to do something stupid. It means something to me.”

Quentin swallowed. Eliot tracked the movement in his throat. A few long seconds passed.

“We could,” he said, leaning closer almost without deciding to. “I mean. Just to get it out of our system.”

Quentin glanced at him. It was very quiet. “Yeah?”

“And then we put it behind us,” said Eliot.

Quentin paused for a long time, and then: “Yeah.”

Eliot had never slept with someone after having a feelings talk with them before, mainly because he usually cut and run the second feelings made themselves known. It left him wrongfooted at first, paranoid that he was giving too much away.

But he hadn't counted on Quentin coming from the same place as he was, which changed the dynamic of the situation. Eliot was surprised at first by how vehemently he kissed him, so that they stumbled back as one ungainly being until Eliot's back hit the counter. One of the glasses crashed to the floor.

“Careful,” he said into Quentin's mouth. “Glass.”

“Bedroom?” said Quentin.

“Yep.”

It was weirdly prosaic, which Eliot was thankful for, on the whole, because it meant that there was no space to think about how if you looked at it one way, he'd been manfully not having sex with Quentin for six thousand years. Looking at it the way Eliot was choosing to look at it, there was just this: the room, still in the state he left it in the morning or a week ago, blinds open so that the only light was streetlight orange, and Quentin, kneeling in the V between Eliot's knees, kissing Eliot like he wanted to eat him alive.

Eliot was not one to be taken aback by most sexual situations, but the very small part of him that wasn't painfully turned on was still a little startled. He compensated automatically, taking Quentin's face in his hands and gentling the edges of the kiss so it was a little less messy and desperate.

“Have you got somewhere to be?” he enquired a little breathlessly.

“Shut up,” said Quentin, pulling futilely at the knot tying Eliot's dressing gown in place. “Can you just - did you _solder_ this shut -”

“I thought the Boy Scouts were you,” said Eliot, undoing it and letting it fall open so that he was just in his boxers. He tugged Quentin's t-shirt - it said THE FUTURE IS FEMALE, he was _hopeless_ \- over his head: fair was fair. “You don't know your knots?”

“I'm pretty sure they were you,” said Quentin, before leaning back in to - god, start giving Eliot a _hickey_ , like they were fifteen and human, Eliot was never going to live that one down, not that he was complaining either. “I don't - camp.”

“Stop talking about Boy Scouts,” said Eliot.

“You started it,” Quentin pointed out, before breaking off abruptly as Eliot shoved his hand inside his pants, palming his dick. “Jesus - Eliot -”

“Yeah, Q,” said Eliot.

Quentin leaned back, hickey abandoned, rolling his hips towards where Eliot was now slowly jacking him off. Eliot crowded forwards until he was hovering over him, echoing how it had been the first time, in Anathema's cottage. It seemed like decades ago. Eliot shook off the memory, leaning down to bite Quentin’s collarbone, eliciting a satisfying gasp.

“El - come on,” said Quentin. “Please.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Eliot. “Take these off.”

Quentin lifted his hips and Eliot pulled his boxers down for him, kicking them away. Then he grinned at Quentin before sucking him into his mouth, bracing an arm across his hips to hold him in place. Quentin moaned at that, arching into it. There were those ready reactions again, as though it was the first time anyone had ever blown him. Eliot supposed it was possible, if unlikely. He expected to feel competitive about it, but the more he thought about it, the more he fixated on the fact that it was the first time _Eliot_ had blown him. The first time Eliot had ever had him spread out like this, like he was allowed to touch as much as he wanted. It snuck up on him while he was distracted, with Quentin's hands tightening in his hair as Eliot swallowed showily around his dick: it had been six thousand years. Eliot hadn't consciously thought about it for the whole time, he hadn't exactly been saving himself for this like a Victorian bride, but now that it was happening, it felt monumental. Irrevocable. It was everything he'd wanted to avoid, and he thought with some trepidation about what it would be like in the morning, but it was all a matter of damage control.

It didn't take Quentin long to come, eyes squeezed shut and shuddering like it’d been punched out of him. Eliot took a few moments to preen at that before Quentin opened his eyes and rolled over to return the favour. He looked alarmingly intent, in a way that was laden with meaning that Eliot didn't want to try to interpret, but once he'd gotten past the initial discomfort of feeling like Quentin was staring into his soul, it was hard to look away. He stroked Eliot for an embarrassingly short amount of time - a minute, maybe two - before Eliot came in his boxers.

He discarded them promptly, before lying back next to Quentin, staring up at the ceiling.

Quentin spoke first. “Better than Shakespeare?”

Eliot tilted his head towards him. Quentin looked back, his lips quirked up. “He didn't fish for compliments,” he said severely, before giving in to the post-coital exhilaration that was rising up from somewhere in his chest and grinning back, wide enough that his cheeks ached with it.

 

  



	2. Chapter 2

After that, thank fuck, things pretty much went back to normal.

Winter in New York was as busy as it ever was. Eliot plunged himself into projects: delaying roadworks, overseeing the opening of increasingly ludicrous concept hipster cafés, kicking off a few new bullshit wellness trends. It was no Goop - that one had taken planning, and pretty much ran itself now, which was the sign of a job well done - but it was something to keep him busy.

He hadn't been this productive in decades. Before the apocalypse, he'd mainly spent his days going out or sleeping or watching Netflix, with a rare spurt of work whenever he remembered that he had a job to do, or whenever people were being particularly annoying. Now, if someone made a montage of his life, it would be very Hollywood: someone very Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the starring role, working in expensive cafés and sitting in boardroom meetings and wearing tailored suits. The work was new, anyway, even if the suits weren’t.

It was almost heartwarming. He supposed that coming so close to the apocalypse would do that to you. It reminded you of what was really important.

Now he had time to focus, and a theoretically limitless leash to work with, given that Hell was MIA. That was what it took to turn a good piece of demonic work into a great one: creativity, freedom, and time, all of which Eliot had in spades since the world's lease had been extended indefinitely.

But although he was doing some of his best work, his heart wasn't really in it. That was nothing new; he'd never put his heart into it before, either. He technically wasn't supposed to have one. Caring, or trying, had always felt embarrassingly earnest, slightly gauche.

Now, though - it wasn't that he wanted to care, but he was acutely aware that he didn't. There was a gap between himself and the rest of the world, the negative space of just not really giving a fuck, and he could feel the edges of it, which had never been true before. It wasn’t that he wanted to close it - far from it. That was leaning into can-of-worms, Quentin territory. The option was just there, waiting for him. It was unnerving.

He hadn’t seen Quentin since the winter. When Eliot had woken up in the morning, he’d gone, which Eliot was mildly grateful for. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, a few months without running into him. They’d been on different continents for the better part of the sixteenth century, after all. It was less awkward this way, probably, at least for a while.

Eliot wasn’t thinking about it.

“Uh huh,” said Margo dubiously. They were hanging out a lot post-apocalypse, just like the old days. Margo was technically based out of the West Coast but there didn't really seem to be any reason to stick with that without anyone from below enforcing it, and besides, a good 80% of being a demon in the 21st century was just about being online. They were trialling a kind of jobshare situation, which pretty much amounted to scrolling companionably through Twitter together. It was nice, except for her habit of making out like she knew something about him that he didn't.

“Let me just have this,” he said. “I like my illusions.”

“Mmm,” she said, raising her eyebrows at him. They were in a café two blocks from Eliot's apartment. It was a bright, cold January day, the light making everything look cleaner as it filtered in through the window where they sat.

Eliot decided to leave it at that. Margo started to type something on her laptop.

A second later: “Okay, yeah. We fucked. But it was for the right reasons. It was actually kind of noble, I think. I barely enjoyed it.”

“Sounds like it,” she said. Eliot threw a pencil at her.

“What? I'm just saying,” she said, before looking at him over the screen and sighing. “Look, you bang, you get over it: fine. Happens to me every day. But the getting over it isn't part of the banging. It just happens because I don't care.”

“I don't care,” said Eliot. “This is me not caring.”

“Uh huh,” she said again, looking back at her screen.

“Would you stop saying that?”

“I’m sparing a thought for your illusions.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

They fell into a companionable silence. Eliot idly checked on a few of the sockpuppet Instagram accounts he ran - mainly fake influencers, a few faux-woke brands too. Back in the bad old days, it had taken weeks of concentrated effort to corrupt even one person's soul. Now, he pretty much just had to log onto Twitter for half an hour and he could call it a day. And what he did didn't even account for a tenth of all the shit that happened; he didn't fuck with the really nasty parts, obviously, but humans were so good at causing chaos themselves that he sometimes wondered what the point was of him doing it for them.

Considering this always put him in a terrible mood.

“Do you ever wonder what it'll be like when it happens for real?” he said.

“Are we still talking about -”

“No,” he said hastily. “I mean the actual apocalypse.”

“Who says it's gonna?”

“You think it won't?”

“It was a test, right? Pretty sure we passed. Or failed, whichever.”

“I thought it was more of a check-the-old-machinery-still-works test,” said Eliot. “Not, like, a character test. It would've been easier just to find out Alice's Myers-Briggs type.”

“Whatever. They're too chickenshit to actually make it happen. There's like fifty million of them for every one of us. _Both_ sides.”

Eliot digested this. It was true, he supposed. But then -

“So are we supposed to just do this - what, until the heat death of the universe?”

“Like good little worker bees,” agreed Margo absently, before looking up. Some of the distaste Eliot was feeling must have shown on his face. “Come on, it's not that bad.”

“I’m just struggling to see the point if we don’t even get a gold star for it.”

“The point is it's fun,” she said. “I like fucking with people. I don't care if I have to do it forever. Better that than saving their souls.”

“I guess,” said Eliot.

In April, he and Margo went on a rare business trip, to the Bahamas, where they’d co-engineered an extremely satisfying microcosm of temporary chaos that he was pretty sure would earn them a commendation, if the managers down below were speaking to him, or offered commendations. Flying to England had clearly worked as a kind of exposure therapy; he managed the flight without any major breakdowns, and Margo was there to get drunk with him in the airport bar before they boarded the plane.

Being a few margaritas in already gave him a sense of unearned confidence on the way back home.

“Wi-fi on planes, us or them?” he asked Margo as they started to take off.

“Us,” she said definitively. “As if they'd do anything that useful.”

 _Wi-fi on planes, us or you?_ he texted Quentin before he could think too much about it.

He didn't text back until they'd landed, by which time Eliot had had plenty of time to think too much about it. _Definitely you._ And then, _Should I be worried?_

_No life or death stakes this time. It’s work._

_Weirdly enough, that's not reassuring._

_Just keeping you on your toes,_ Eliot typed out, before deleting it and sending _:)_ instead. It was better to cultivate an air of mystery.

After that, they texted occasionally. It wasn’t a big deal; it wasn’t like they’d talked constantly under normal circumstances. Things reminded Eliot of Quentin every now and then - predictable shit, like a Taylor Swift song on the radio or someone with his particular brand of earnest unfashionable shaking a money box in a subway station for charity - and it was easy to text him something witty about it. Quentin rarely texted first, but would often reply a few hours later with a picture of something he’d just seen, totally unrelated to whatever it was they were talking about.

It was companionable, and it loosened a knot in Eliot’s chest that he hadn’t realised was there. It wasn’t that he’d been worried about it, exactly. But everything else had gone back to normal, and it was good to know that this had as well.

By total coincidence, he was texting Quentin while grocery shopping on a Saturday in late July when he heard someone say his name.

 _Did you do this??_ he'd texted a few seconds previously, before sending Eliot a link which read 'Netflix’s Fillory and Further Cast Announced - “Childhood Dream Come True!” says Benedict Cumberbatch’.

 _HAHAHAHAHA_ , Eliot texted back, juggling his phone with a bottle of expensive olive oil, and _Maybe._

It was partially true. He'd asked Margo to work her magic, anyway; most TV and movies were in her remit, with a few notable exceptions.

He was halfway through texting her _Thanks bb_ when he heard it.

“Eliot?”

Eliot turned. It took him a second, which was unnerving, but at least half of that was because the wrong fruit sprang to mind first.

“Plum?”

She was wearing dungarees, and was holding a basket filled with bougie, unstudenty products. Eliot could see a whole wheel of cheese in there.

“I thought it was you,” she said, with a wide, genuine smile.

“What are you doing here?” Eliot was genuinely taken aback. He'd pretty much forgotten about her as soon as it all ended.

“My parents live here,” she said. “Most of the time. But anyway, I have an - internship.”

“You don't sound convinced,” said Eliot.

“It's unorthodox,” she said, like she was telling a joke that Eliot wasn't supposed to get. Eliot eyed her.

“Great,” he said. “Unorthodox. Well, your family is rich, I guess.”

He checked his phone. _I really hate you sometimes_ , Quentin had texted a couple of minutes ago.

 _Good thing we're mortal enemies then,_ he replied.

“You should try this kind instead,” Plum said, popping up by his shoulder and unceremoniously divesting him of the olive oil he was still holding. “It's ethically produced.”

“You have read this room totally wrong,” Eliot told her, but got distracted by his phone before he could stop her putting it in his own basket. _Well, if we weren't before_ …

“Hey, what are you doing now?” said Plum. Eliot had a brief, nightmarish glimpse into what it would be like to have a child.

“I'm not talking to you,” he said flatly. “And I'm picking up stuff for risotto.”

“No, I mean after this,” she said, ignoring his tone. “You should come over for coffee. So we can catch up.”

“I have a very important business meeting,” he said automatically. “Sorry, kid.”

“You sound like Harrison Ford,” she said. “You're not pulling it off.”

Eliot started to walk away.

“Wait, stop,” she said, hurrying after him. “Sorry, sorry - though can I just say your skin is incredibly thin for being beyond the mortal plane? Okay, sorry. Look, I just - it would be nice to talk about it. With someone who was there.”

Unwillingly, Eliot came to a halt in the middle of the dairy products aisle. “What's to talk about? Nothing happened.”

“It happened,” she said. “Come on. I won't bother you again.”

Eliot looked at her. She seemed genuine enough, though maybe that was just because she looked so young.

“If we eat some of that cheese,” he conceded. “What do you need a whole wheel for, anyway? It's the size of your head.”

“This is a judgement-free zone,” she said primly, which was highly offensive seeing as Eliot was right there, but before he could answer, she'd left to pay.

Left in the aisle, he checked his phone again, and in an unwise moment of half-distracted confusion, he texted Quentin back saying _You love me really_ , before shaking himself out of it. This was why he'd repressed all his feelings about the whole episode in the first place.

They met outside the store and walked to Plum’s apartment. Eliot feebly suggested going to a bar instead, but she ignored him.

“You live here?” he said skeptically. He'd been expecting the kind of apartment building that was half-empty because it'd been bought up by oligarchs as an investment. He eyed a rat that looked like it was trying to wear a condom as a hat.

“I'm staying with my boss,” she said evasively.

“Okay, I'm a demon, and even I know that's not right,” he said as she let them in. As promised, she cut them some cheese and opened a bottle of wine with a practiced hand. It was very civilised.

“Where’s your girlfriend, anyway?” he said. “Stuck back in Lower Tadfield?”

“No, she's actually on tour,” said Plum, face softening. “I'm going to visit her back in Tadfield once I'm done here, though.”

“She's in a band?”

“She skateboards for England,” Plum corrected.

“Of course she does,” Eliot muttered. Plum ignored this.

“So, start from when you left,” she said. “Or actually, Adam's story was pretty abridged, maybe you could explain -”

They were interrupted by the sound of someone unlocking the door

“Shit,” said Plum, before they came in. It was Julia.

They stared at each other for a second, before Eliot looked back at Plum. “Unorthodox is not the first adjective I would use for witch school.”

“It is unorthodox,” she said fairly.

“What are you doing here?” said Julia. It was hard to read her face; she didn't look thrilled to see Eliot, but then again, people usually didn't.

“I thought you weren’t going to be back for ages,” said Plum.

“You said you wanted me to tell you about the apocalypse!” said Eliot, choosing to address Plum instead of Julia. “You said you wanted to talk to someone who'd been through it! You share a bathroom with someone who'd been through it!”

“She doesn't tell me anything,” said Plum. “You seemed like an easier target.”

“Yeah, well, forgive me for not wanting to revisit the time my boyfriend got possessed by the spirit of Death,” said Julia, dropping her bag on the side and taking a seat next to Eliot. “But if you’re doing this, I’m staying. Can I have some wine?”

Explaining it all to Plum took some time, particularly with Julia chipping in every now and then to fill them in on what she and Kady had been doing while Eliot and Quentin were in England. It was a strange relief, though, to talk about it in such forensic detail, filling in all the gaps that were remaining in Eliot’s version of events. He’d talked to Margo about it, obviously, but it was hard to do so without thinking of that moment on the riverbed where they’d stood on opposite sides. And Eliot had been so focused on getting things back to normal, anyway, that he hadn’t liked to think about it too much.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Plum was a good listener, with all the right reactions, and Eliot found himself enjoying the telling of the story. They had enough distance from it now that it felt less stress-inducing and more cinematic, almost. Eliot could see it all happening in his mind’s eye like a movie directed by Steven Spielberg. And he was right in the middle of it, he realised with some surprise. He was the Tom Hanks. Or, at least, the Matt Damon.

He’d been there, lived through it. It was strange to think that he was - he heard Quentin again, saying _if we were ever going to be heroes_. It hadn’t felt that way at the time, though. He wasn’t used to the feeling of being involved and he found it uncomfortable; in all his interactions with the world over the years, he’d changed as much as he could without exposing any of himself. He’d almost convinced himself he’d forgotten about it over the past half year. But half a year was basically a blink of an eye to the rest of his life.

It was enough time for him to look back and recognise, though, that it wasn’t just disconcerting. Looking back at that moment on the riverbed, him and Quentin and Kady and Julia against the end of the world, he felt something that was weirdly like pride.

“So everything went back to how it was before?” said Plum. “I mean, I woke up and it was last week. I had to redo my last assignment of term and everything.”

“Yeah,” said Eliot. “And nobody remembers apart from the people who knew, I think. At least, nobody else has mentioned it.”

“What happened to Alice?”

“I don’t really know,” he admitted. “I mean - I guess things worked out with her. Quentin talked her down, I think.”

“Have you spoken to him?” said Julia.

He glanced at her, but her face was impassive, turned away slightly. “I talked to him afterwards. Have you?”

“Yes,” she said, and looked back at him. It was a complicated look. Eliot couldn’t tell how much she knew about it, but he figured it must be at least some. “I haven’t seen him in a while, though.”

“Me either,” he said. “Well - we text.”

“You know, I thought you guys were together actually,” said Plum obliviously, pouring herself some more wine. Despite himself, Eliot looked at Julia, who raised her eyebrows at him. She definitely knew about some of it.

“That was before I knew about the whole demon/angel thing,” Plum continued. “Then I was like, oh, I must’ve read that one wrong. That seems like a pretty significant thing.”

“Exactly,” said Eliot, as Julia said, “Oh, I don’t know.”

“Ooh,” said Plum. “Fight, fight, fight.”

“I don’t know,” Julia said, looking directly at Eliot. “I think that if we’ve learned anything it’s that the things you would think matter, don’t. Not in the way you thought they would.”

“Hence, polyamory,” said Eliot, slightly bitchily.

“Exactly,” said Julia. “I’m not embarrassed. Look, there are so many ways of being in the world. I’ve tried a lot of them. This one makes me happy. Fuck the rest, right?”

“Fuck the rest,” agreed Plum, slightly tipsily, raising her glass to clink against Julia’s.

“It’s a little more complicated when you’re going to be alive for the rest of time,” said Eliot. “The things you people - want, do, make, whatever - you can do that fine knowing it’ll all be over in eighty years anyway. Eighty years was yesterday for me.”

“Eliot,” said Plum, leaning forward. “Eliot. Look. Shut the fuck up.”

“She’s got a point,” said Julia. “Anyway, as far as we know, the rest of time could be, like, three weeks from now.”

“Mm,” he said, not wanting to argue the point. Julia smiled at him - a real smile, small and personal. Eliot could see why Quentin liked her.

“I love my girlfriend right _now_ ,” said Plum suddenly. “Fuck yesterday! I’m going to call her right away.”

“It’ll be late - okay, too late,” said Julia, as Plum disappeared with her phone into the bathroom. “You know, she’s, like, five years younger than me, but it’s like having an actual child sometimes.”

“I get that vibe,” said Eliot. “What’s her deal, anyway? Aren’t her parents fuck-off billionaires? What’s she doing -?”

“In this shithole?” said Julia. “She wants to learn magic. Kady and I are the best.”

“What are we talking about?” said Plum, reappearing as suddenly as she’d left. “Pepper won’t pick up.”

“It’s, like, 3am where she is now,” said Julia. “We’re talking about your family.

Plum shuddered theatrically. “The less said the better. Though, actually, I wanted to tell your boyfriend about this -” directed at Eliot, who decided it would be easiest to let that one go “-seeing as he’s so interested in the Fillory books. My great, great - uh. _Ancestor_ , was a Chatwin. You know, the kids in the books? We’re the last ones left. The upper classes died out pretty quick in the war, except the ones who went to America.”

“That’s _awesome,_ ” said Julia, unexpectedly, before Eliot could say anything. “Which one are you descended from? Obviously not Jane or Martin.”

“Rupert,” said Plum, looking pleased at Julia's enthusiasm. “My mom owns the old house still. It's not too far from Tadfield, you know. I actually have the keys, for when I visit Pepper next month.”

Eliot was struck by the memory of looking at Quentin look out of the taxi window, so viscerally he could almost smell the musty car air.

“Can I see them?” asked Eliot, surprising himself. “The keys, I mean.”

“Sure,” said Plum affably, retrieving them from her bag. They were just regular keys. Eliot didn't know what he'd expected, exactly. Maybe for them to look a little more mysterious. The battered otter-shaped keychain dulled the intrigue somewhat.

“Underwhelming,” he said.

“It's better inside,” she said. “Lots of Fillory memorabilia. So I hear, anyway. We don't really talk about that side of the family.”

“Sounds healthy,” he said, turning the keys over in his hand, before dropping them. When he looked up, he caught Julia watching him; she held his gaze for a long, uncertain moment before looking away, refilling her wineglass.

The afternoon turned into evening, and despite himself, Eliot got roped into making his risotto right there for all three of them. He put it down to being drunk, though it was nice to be (rightfully) complimented about it, too.

When he left, the sun was going down, and Plum had extracted a standing drinks invitation from him somehow, which was definitely the opposite of not bothering him again, but he couldn't quite puzzle out how they'd ended up there so he figured it was better to just leave it. Julia nodded at him. Quentin hadn't come up again, though he wasn't sure if they'd both been avoiding the topic, or if it had just been him.

Eliot hadn't heard back from him, anyway. It turned out read receipts were not as genius a concept as he'd once thought.

Quentin was probably doing something stupid like rescuing baby crabs from a sewage pit, where he had to wear gloves and didn't have any phone signal. They didn't usually talk about work, but it was easy for Eliot to project the productivity he'd been experiencing back onto Quentin. It made sense as a reaction to the almost end of everything. The difference between them was that Eliot still had that distance, where his heart wasn't. Quentin was the guy who could never possibly hand out enough flyers to assuage how much he cared about handing out enough flyers, getting rained on ad infinitum. It depressed Eliot a little to think about him back there on the sidewalk in his whale beanie.

But that was why it wouldn't have worked, he reminded himself, slightly hollowly.

It was quiet in his apartment, after all the time he'd spent with Plum and Julia. He dropped his empty grocery tote on the floor. Unexpectedly, something clinked.

He frowned at it, then toed it open, before bending down to pick up the keys to the Chatwin house.

There was a hastily scribbled post-it stuck to them. _Bring them back before I leave or there'll be hell to pay (get it?)_ it said, and then below, in slightly different handwriting, _Good luck._

Eliot stared at it for a while, even though it wasn't exactly subtle. He felt a strange, manic mix of hilarity and ire. Who did they think they _were_? Eliot had spent thousands of years playing the manipulation game. It was different now, but back then, it had taken weeks of careful work to corrupt a person, drip-feeding them the desire to cheat on their husband or depose a king or whatever so that they thought they'd come with it all by their clever little selves. It was inception before Christopher Nolan was a twinkle in his great-great-great-whatever-grandfather’s eye. He was the king of getting people to do things without them knowing it. This - it was amateurish, a crayon drawing by a three-year-old when Eliot was the fucking Renoir of puppet-mastering. Eliot was embarrassed for them, really.

It was clear what they thought was going to happen. There was pretty much one person in the whole world who had any use for the keys, and Julia was perfectly capable of giving them to him herself if she wanted. No: this was meddling. Coming from Eliot, it was a _gesture_. Cue fireworks and end credits and fuck the rest of time, or the hosts of heaven and hell, or any of the big, universe things that it was so convenient not to think about.

It was so _obvious_ . It was insulting that anyone could think Eliot could be that predictable, without even breaking down the gaping plot holes in the rest of it. Not least that he didn't need two pint-sized witches to Chekhov's gun him into having some kind of - _realisation_ , like the plot of a bad romcom.

Eliot wasn't an idiot. He was good at not thinking about things he didn't want to think about, but the thing about being a demon who had been tricked into caring about Earth was that you ended up with more neuroses than an upper-class New Yorker. The more you skirted carefully around something, the better you knew exactly where it was and what it looked like. There wasn't a lot of practical difference between the thought _at least I don't have feelings_ or _thank fuck I don't have feelings_ and - well, the obvious, not when you were thinking it every day. Doth protest, etc.

It was just that what Eliot felt was only the smallest part of it. It was impossible to tell how much of it was organic, and how much he'd just picked up from the ambient noise of humanity over the centuries, like he'd picked up a propensity for smoking cigarettes and owning minimalist pot plants. There was something absurd, a little terrifying, about the thought of what could have happened if the night after the apocalypse had gone the other way, with Eliot performing the kind of relationship he only knew about from other people, like a simulacrum. There was no empirical proof, no body of precedence to assume that he wouldn't wake up one day and realise he'd been pretending all along without his even realising it.

The only thing worse was _not_ waking up and out of it one day; spending the rest of his life, however many hundreds of years that might be, truly, sincerely, earnestly feeling things. Saying: fuck the rest of time. Fuck the hosts of heaven and hell. Fuck the big, wide universe.

It would be like being Quentin. Quentin, who had been so miserable in the world, even as he loved it like none of the rest of them did, that he would have let it end if Eliot hadn't been around. Something would inevitably go wrong: the world had to end one day, after all. Once Eliot had put everything on the line, he would have everything to lose, and six thousand years had taught him that you always lost eventually. It was just a matter of scale. If you invested in the world as little as possible, you would survive. You might even be happy.

Anyway, taking things that seriously didn't really mesh with Eliot's brand, which he liked to think of as 'insouciant’.

He spent a while feeling outraged, before it all seemed to start leaking out of him, like helium from a balloon. Eventually he was left sitting at his dining table looking at the bunch of keys, which miraculously had not spontaneously combusted through the sheer force of his fuming. It would have been easier if they had; it would have solved the problem of what to do with them.

He could send them straight back to Plum with an icy, witty note, which would have the benefit of rescinding the standing drinks invite. But letting on that he knew that they knew would show Eliot's hand. It was bad enough that they already thought they knew something about him. They'd already been more involved than they had any right to be.

He considered getting rid of them. It would be the easiest thing, for sure. He wouldn't have to think about it again, and it was a petty revenge against Plum for making him think about it all in the first place: win-win. But the more he thought about it, the less satisfying it became. With a maturity he mentally patted himself on the back for displaying, he could admit to himself that it felt uncomfortably like sweeping it under a rug. It would come back to bite him in the ass, he just knew it.

And it didn't help that he'd been thinking of Quentin before, because it was impossible to not think of him now, the genuine and uncomplicated delight on his face at the prospect of being in a house where some guy had once written a book. He'd been around for long enough that books had existed for a minority of his lifetime, but this tiny thing got his rocks off. Eliot could not relate, but it was still, despite himself, endearing.

 _If anyone deserved to actually get some joy out of this_ , a small and rebellious voice at the back of his mind said. He ignored it, but didn't force the thought away.

He fell asleep with the situation still unresolved. When he woke up, he'd forgotten about it, at least for a few blissful minutes until he wandered into his kitchen to make coffee and saw the keys still on the table.

He stared at them for a second then, without giving himself time to think too much about it, grabbed them, and disappeared.

* * *

 

Then he was outside Quentin's apartment in Boston, barefoot and in the clothes he'd fallen asleep in. There was no going back, though; it had taken a particular alchemical combination of post-sleep vagueness and brazening it out to get him there, and he wasn't sure it would work a second time.

There was no way of posting them through the door. He thought about leaving them outside for Quentin to find, but someone else could come across them first, and anyway, Quentin wouldn't know what they were. He didn't have anything to write a note with.

The easiest thing would be to just teleport in, but Eliot was haunted by the prospect of Quentin walking in on him, and having to _explain_.

He stood caught in indecision for a few moments before snapping.

“Fuck it,” he said, and raised his hand to knock on the door.

Before he could, though, it opened.

“Oh,” he said. It was like having a bucket of water thrown over him. Having spent a lot of time in medieval taverns, he was familiar with the experience.

“Oh,” said Alice. “It's you.”

“It's me,” Eliot agreed, feeling idiotic all of a sudden. He held Plum’s keys behind his back. “Where's -”

“Quentin's not here,” she said. She eyed him for a few moments, looking inscrutable, before standing back. “You should come in.”

“Oh, that's fine,” said Eliot hastily. “You're obviously going somewhere. Looking very - uh, chic, too! I'll just - go.”

“Come in,” she said again, forcefully, and Eliot was uncomfortably reminded that he was talking to his boss’s kid. He followed suit, meekly.

Alice looked like she'd been heading to class, wearing a deeply unfashionable backpack and a librarian turtleneck which, to her credit, did everything for her boobs. Even without the sense of immeasurable power, she looked better than she had last time, though the bar wasn't exactly high.

She took off her backpack and sat on the sofa, avoiding Eliot's eye. Gingerly, Eliot sat next to her.

He looked around the room. It was distinctly different to how it had been before. Quentin's bookshelves, with their mix of tattered cult sci-fi paperbacks and leatherbound first editions, now also sported the ugly block-colour spines of scientific textbooks. There was a Metric poster on the wall which Eliot didn't remember from before, and a clothes dryer with pretty-but-functional bras hanging off of it.

Sweet, naive Eliot of two minutes ago, he thought. Who had thought that it would be awkward if Quentin was there. How little he'd known.

“I wanted to say thanks,” Alice said abruptly, a millisecond before the silence became too excruciating to bear.

“Oh,” said Eliot. “Don't mention it. Please.”

“No, really,” she said. She sounded like she was speaking under extreme duress, but she was almost as earnest as Quentin. It made Eliot itchy. “I know what you did.”

“I mean, I've never been accused of modesty before,” Eliot said. “But it was Quentin, if anything. I couldn't have - you know. You don't - it's fine.”

 _You don't owe me_ , he wanted to say. The thought of a debt between them made him uncomfortable for reasons he wasn't quite sure of. He just wanted it to stay firmly in the past.

“I hate talking about it too,” she said determinedly. “But if it wasn't for you then he wouldn't have - he might have, but it would've been too late. So thanks. Okay?”

There was nothing Eliot could really say to that. “Look, this is too weird. Can I leave these here for Quentin? Tell him - I don't know, whatever, say a cartoon bird dropped them in your lap while you were singing a little song, he already pretty much thinks you're a Disney princess, it won't be hard for him to believe.”

She took the keys from him, turning them over curiously. “What are they?”

Eliot paused, before saying, reluctantly, “The keys to the Chatwin house. From -”

“Fillory and Further,” Alice said. She looked up at him. “I know.”

There was something in her face that looked, unbearably, a bit like pity.

“I just happened to find them,” he said defensively. “It's not a big deal.”

“It's nice,” she said, and looked sorry. “It’s a nice idea, Eliot. But he's not here. I told you.”

“You don't have to do it right this minute,” he said. “I mean, the longer it takes, the better. Gives me plausible deniability.”

“I mean he's not in the country,” she said.

Eliot stared at her. “What?”

“During spring break,” she said. “We went to England. To see - you know. My brother.”

“I thought he died,” said Eliot stupidly, then, “Oh.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Anyway. I came back; Quentin stayed. He wasn't happy here.”

“I know that,” said Eliot, instinctively proprietorial. “It's never - that's old news. Something else must have happened.”

“Well, yeah,” she said, levelling a meaningful look at him. “Or didn't happen.”

Eliot moved swiftly on. “But why England?”

“It's peaceful, I guess,” she said. “It was convenient.”

“Quentin doesn't do peaceful,” said Eliot surely. “He does stupid adventures. He'll be bored in ten minutes.”

“Well, it's been a few months,” she said. “My lease on the apartment downstairs ran out when the summer vacation started so he let me stay here. He's staying with the witch. Anathema.”

There was no way Plum hadn't known, which only added insult to injury.

Alice was looking at him. “Are you...okay?”

“Fine,” said Eliot. “I just have a miniature witch to murder.”

Alice paused. “What?”

Somehow, without Eliot consciously deciding to tell it, the whole story came spilling out of him.

“And it's like - like Airpods,” he concluded expansively. “Built-in obsolescence. Anything you invest in is going to crash and/or burn eventually. That's what the world is like.”

Alice looked like she wished she hadn't asked. To be fair, it had sounded a lot better in Eliot's head.

“You obviously already know about the crashing and burning, so feel free to back me up on that,” he added, a little feebly.

Alice frowned. Begrudgingly, he appreciated her taking it seriously. “Well - okay, I mean that's not wrong. But it's an inaccurate analogy. You can't compare a break-up with the apocalypse.”

“It’s all a matter of scale,” he tried.

She shook her head. “You're being obtuse. If you really weren't invested in the world, you wouldn't have bothered saving it.”

Eliot sat back. “That's - that's different.”

“I thought it was all a matter of scale,” she said coolly.

Despite himself, Eliot felt a flicker of liking. She was clearly stone-cold, despite what Quentin thought. Her roots were strong. Eliot could respect that.

“Anyway, I thought _you_ and Quentin - you know,” he said, not quite intelligibly, before giving up and making an obscene hand gesture.

“Charming,” she said. “No. We're friends.”

Eliot raised an eyebrow and waited, hoping it would help him regain his footing in the conversation. Sure enough -

“We weren't - it was obvious it wouldn't work,” she said. “To both of us. It wasn't good.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes you just know,” he said pointedly.

“Yes,” she said. “I did. And now I don't think about it, or come up with weird, convoluted - you're the only person I've ever met with more neuroses than me, you know that? It doesn't have to be this hard.”

“What, leaving this conversation?” said Eliot, standing up. “It’s not! See you around, Alice. Or, and no offence, hopefully not.”

“Wait,” she said. There was something uncannily Adamlike in her expression; it was impossible not to pay attention. Eliot sat back down.

“Look. I was in a really bad place in the autumn. My brother died last year, and my parents haven't exactly dealt with it well, and school is really fucking hard and meanwhile everything in the world is going wrong and the planet is dying, and - it was such a tiny thing that day. When you're already on the edge, it just takes one sign that you should just leap off for you to do it.”

“Profound,” Eliot murmured, just to be a dick. Alice ignored him.

“My mom emailed me saying they got rid of Charlie's things, and they hadn't even asked if I wanted anything. I just - it just made me wish everything was _over._ And then it would have been, and you guys showed up, and it wasn't anymore, and I still - I don't know if it's better this way. But it might be, and that’s worth me having to live with that choice for the rest of my life.”

“That’ll be, like, sixty years,” said Eliot. “Not the rest of _time_.”

“You and Quentin,” she said, jaw set. “You helped me. I owe you.”

“No, you don't,” said Eliot quickly.

“Not after this,” she said. “If you needed a sign, this is it. You should go to England.”

“No,” said Eliot. “I don't - it's fine. I'll see him sometime.”

“That's not the point,” she said. “You have to choose.

“I don't -”

“It doesn't have to be this hard,” she said again, gentler. “Look, I don't exactly have my shit together. But I know that.”

Eliot hesitated. He was dimly aware that he was teetering on some great precipice. The last time he had felt like this - like he actually had a choice, one that mattered - the fall had been uncomfortably literal. It was fighting the avoidance habit of a very long lifetime to even consider it.

 _I need to get the fuck out of here_ , he thought, clear as a bell, and before he could devote much energy to the parts of his mind where his neuroses lived, he nodded.

Alice's face relaxed. “Thank you.”

There was silence for a moment, before she said, “Um, I meant you should go, like, now. I have class.”

* * *

 

This time, Eliot spent the flight over determinedly asleep.

He was feeling distinctly odd. He had been since before Boston, probably, though he'd had the wherewithal not to acknowledge it until then. But it was different now. Before, it had been an uneasiness deep in the pit of his stomach, easy enough to ignore. Now, it was like someone had taken out all his insides and replaced them with cotton stuffing. Or clockwork, leaving him to run on autopilot. It made it easier to fall asleep, but when he woke up, it didn't feel like it was all the way, and walking through arrivals, it was like he'd left some important part of himself 50,000 feet in the sky.

It was kind of like the apocalypse over again; the wheels were turning, but he didn't have any control over where they were going. Somehow, running away from the inevitable, he'd managed to double back on himself, and now here he was, watching himself chase it down. A crash landing seemed likely.

It felt like no time had passed before he was standing outside Anathema and Newt’s cottage, which was even more beautiful in the early summer than it had been back in the fall. It was a clear, warm day, the air soft on Eliot's skin like the most expensive of blankets. It was like being inside a painting. Still bizarrely dreamlike, he rang the doorbell, startling a nearby dozing chicken.

It took a few moments for someone to answer, which it turned out was all the suspense he'd needed to shock him part-way out of the fugue state.

He was going to see Quentin, and they were going to have to _talk._ What the fuck was Eliot supposed to say? This was the sort of thing that happened to other people. He wasn't even sure what he meant by being there.

The Chatwin keys were burning a hole in his pocket. They didn't have to mean anything, he reminded himself. Eliot wasn't going to be that obvious. Or would he have to be? Maybe other people just leaned into the obvious. Maybe that was how they figured out what to do.

Eliot was so out of his depth. But then again, what else was new?

He was shaken out of it by the door finally opening.

“Eliot,” Anathema said. “Alice called ahead. It's good to see you.”

Unexpectedly, she leaned forward and enveloped him in a hug. Eliot's hands hovered over her back in surprise for a second before he gingerly patted her head. She laughed into his shoulder and pulled away. Eliot eyed her with some trepidation in case she did anything else alarming, but she just looked happy. Happy to see Eliot, like they were old friends.

“Come in,” she said. “Lots to catch up on.”

“Is Quentin -” he said, unable to stop himself.

She looked curiously at him. “No, he's at work. He'll be home in a little bit.”

“Okay,” said Eliot, disappointment warring with relief inside his chest, and followed her in.

“He's volunteering at Oxfam,” she continued, as they walked down the hallway to the kitchen. They'd repainted the walls, Eliot noted abstractedly. “Stop me if you know this all already. It’s set the village about its ears, I can tell you, an American who wears his hair in a bun pricing the paperbacks. The old biddies haven't had this much excitement since the old air base closed down. I think they don't know whether they should disapprove or fall in love with him.”

“The eternal dilemma,” said Eliot, amused despite himself. Anathema looked back at him knowingly, which immediately dampened it.

“Newt,” she said, as they came into the kitchen. “Look who’s here.”

Newt looked up from where he was carefully plaiting bread dough. “Eliot!”

He looked genuinely pleased to see him, too. It was like walking into the Twilight Zone. Eliot hadn’t met so many friendly people in such short succession in decades, not since a brief flirtation he’d once had with the Amish. It immediately put him on his guard.

“Eliot’s here for Quentin,” said Anathema, and they exchanged a loaded look.

“Ah,” said Newt, significantly. “Say no more.”

“What?” said Eliot suspiciously. “What’s going on?”

“Sit down,” Anathema said. “Don't loiter. It's good we could have a word with you.I It's about Quentin.”

“What?” said Eliot. “What about him? Is he okay?”

“Well,” said Newt. “He’s a bit - out of sorts.”

“He’s two weeks away from donating all his clothes to charity and adopting a kitten with three legs,” said Anathema bluntly. “He’s full-on having a midlife crisis.”

“And we don't want to presume,” said Newt earnestly. “About - the nature of - your relationship -”

“Please just kill me now,” said Eliot. “It would be kinder.”

“These things are difficult to talk about,” he persevered. “Especially if you're less in tune with your emotions. I was just like you, you know, before I met this one.”

“We thought something might have happened,” said Anathema hastily, perhaps sensing how close Eliot was to losing it. “With you both. We're worried. We've gotten to know him. He's a nice kid.”

“Okay, he is _thousands_ of years older than you,” said Eliot. “And he's always been like that. St Quentin of Masochism. If he's any worse now, it's because he finally snapped. He just stopped the world from ending, did you not think that might be it?”

But Eliot hadn't, either, he thought with a sudden surge of - guilt? Regret? Eliot had thought Quentin's life had gone back to how it had been before. He hadn't imagined this.

It was disconcerting to think Eliot might have misjudged him.

“I don't know,” said Newt. “He goes on so many walks. I think he, er - “gets high” out there, if you know what I mean.”

“Unfortunately,” Eliot said.

“And my god, the music,” said Anathema. “Every night, it's Miserable Bastard hour. Any depressed fucker from the past twenty years is fair game. He's very considerate of the baby, and of course I like R.E.M as much as anyone, it's not about that. But - we said he can stay here as long as he wants, and we meant that. But I don't know if it's as good for him as he thinks. It's like he's regressing. I don't know if you ever were teenagers, but he’s certainly acting like one now.”

“You can't outrun your problems,” said Newt wisely. “For all your lot are supposedly divine and immortal, you don't seem to be very mindful.”

Eliot stared between them. He'd thought Crowley and Aziraphale had gone native for adopting a witch, but Quentin had let the witch adopt _him_. The situation had escalated beyond anything he'd ever thought it could be.

“He obviously cares about you,” said Anathema. Eliot bit his tongue. “And Alice - on the phone, she didn't say very much, but -”

“I get it,” said Eliot irritably. “You want me to talk to him. No offence, but at this point it's starting to get unoriginal.”

“So you will?” Anathema said, but before anyone could say anything else, the door opened. Eliot's stomach swooped.

“Hey,” Quentin called, sounding far away through the old rock walls, before the sound of footsteps trudged up the stairs above them.

“Come on,” ordered Anathema, and pulled Eliot by the wrist out into the hallway to the foot of the staircase just as Quentin rounded the corner.

“You've got a visitor,” she called after him. Somewhere in the house, the baby started crying. Anathema swore guiltily and climbed up the stairs, brushing past Quentin, who had turned around.

“Oh,” he said. “Eliot?”

“Hey, Q,” Eliot said.

“What are you doing here?” he said. “Is - I mean, is everything okay?”

“It's good to see you,” said Eliot, apropos of - he didn't know what. He shook himself out of it. “I mean, yeah. No bad news this time.”

Quentin started to come back downstairs. His hair was, in fact, up in a bun. Eliot had vaguely expected something integral to have changed about him, but he looked just the same.

“Why don't you two go for a walk,” said Newt loudly, popping up next to Eliot's shoulder and winking unsubtly at him. “But don't do anything I wouldn't do!”

“I truly do not like you,” said Eliot devoutly.

Newt held the door open, looking expectant. Eliot looked back at Quentin, who raised his eyebrows at him. His face was mostly unreadable.

Eliot wavered for a moment, then bottled it.

“Actually, we're borrowing your car,” he said, grabbing the keys from where they hung on the side. “Hope you don't mind, don't really care if you do.”

“Oh - well, no objections here,” said Newt. “But just so you know, it doesn't always go.”

“Whatever,” said Eliot, and made his escape.

Quentin waited until they were reversing down Newt and Anathema's stupidly narrow driveway in Newt’s deeply ugly car and Eliot was regretting all his choices before speaking. “Can I just ask -?”

“No,” said Eliot, teeth gritted. It had been a long time since he'd driven anywhere, which had been a point of pride until right then. Then again, it was possible that a few scratches would actually improve it.

“Great,” Quentin muttered, and turned on the radio. There was a moment of silence before Freddie Mercury started up. _It's the terror of knowing what this world is about_ -

Eliot reached over and snapped it off again. Quentin didn't argue.

The day was in the process of stretching languidly into evening, skies clear and bright still, and the silence in the car stretched out, too, turning easier. Without looking, Eliot could sense Quentin's shoulders relaxing minutely as he looked out of the window. It was like the weight of whatever it was that Eliot was going to say, or what had happened the last time they'd seen each other, had just been neatly subsumed into the rest of the history they had with each other. It didn't hang in the air; it was trodden down, worn in, familiar.

And there was something heady about the golden evening air, which was as rich as if it had been filtered through honey. He supposed that was the Adam effect.

As he thought it, they saw him, just a figure in jeans and a hoodie in the far distance, with Dog trotting by his side. He raised a hand towards them, silhouetted against the sun. Quentin waved back. Eliot glanced sideways at him.

“What?” said Quentin.

“You're buddies now?”

Quentin shrugged. “I don’t know, I ran into him a couple of times. Out in the woods.”

Something fell into place. “Oh my _god_ ,” said Eliot. “Please don't tell me the fucking Antichrist is your _weed guy_.”

“What?” said Quentin again, unconvincingly. “No…”

“This place is a cult,” said Eliot. “I mean, out of all the places in the world you could have gone, Q.”

“It wasn't like I planned it,” said Quentin. “I just - well, Alice wanted to meet Adam. And I figured someone should check out the third kid, too. Just so we'd know if we had to deal with this again.”

“Oh, fuck,” said Eliot, turning right. “I forgot about him. Grimy.”

“Greasy,” said Quentin. “Well - David. Anyway, he's human. But I guess - it felt easier to just stay. And here, you know - everything is good.” His mouth twisted wryly. “There's no suffering.”

“It's peaceful,” Eliot said, the words tasting strange in his mouth.

Quentin looked sideways at him. “You think it was stupid?”

Eliot pulled into a passing point and turned off the engine. “I think we have to walk from here.”

“Are you going to tell me where we're going?” Quentin said, unmoving.

“No,” Eliot said cheerfully. Quentin sighed, sounding put-upon, and opened the door.

They were in the countryside proper now, on a little dirt path stretching down the side of a wide field. Eliot walked delicately and tried not to sneeze.

“I used to work over there,” Quentin volunteered after a second, pointing over the field. Eliot squinted, but he couldn't see anything.

“Doing what, farming?”

“No,” said Quentin. “This is all - you know, the Plover estate. From -”

“I know,” said Eliot.

“Yeah, I was a tour guide there for like a week,” Quentin said, seemingly oblivious to how incredible a statement this was.

“A _tour guide_ ,” said Eliot, delighted.

“Yeah, well,” said Quentin. “Turns out he wasn't that great. So I quit.”

“Oh,” said Eliot. “Wow. Sorry.”

Quentin shrugged. “Things can't just be good, right? That's your whole thing.”

“Yeah, but - I wouldn't want that,” said Eliot. “I wouldn't have done that.”

“Yeah,” said Quentin heavily. “You know, it was stupid. This whole thing.”

“I didn't say that,” said Eliot.

“You were thinking it.”

“No,” Eliot insisted. “It - I thought it was _good_.”

It came out fiercer than he'd intended, and he paused, surprised, before dialling it back.

“I mean - I get it. It's good that you got out. Are you kidding, Q?”

He stopped himself before he could say something like, _you were always braver than me._ But it was true: here was as far as you could get from a rainy sidewalk in Boston, and Eliot was glad.

Even if he wasn't sure where that left him.

Quentin looked over at him.

“I thought,” he said, a little tentatively. “That we were in this for life?”

Eliot hadn't expected it, but the reminder was surprisingly easy to take in his stride.

“People, many of them wise and all-knowing, have argued that,” he agreed. “And they weren't wrong. Being wise, and all-knowing. But - I don't know.”

Quentin waited.

“I mean, I'm still working,” said Eliot. “If anything, I'm better at it than before. I got Taylor Swift into Cats, I'm pretty sure that's the best work I’ve done since the Great Fire of London.”

Quentin looked pained. “Cats?”

“Specifically for you, angel,” said Eliot. “Well, that one was fun. But - I don't know. At this rate we'll be going until the sun burns out. I know it's ineffable, but it's starting to feel like that's just a cover-up. Something's off.”

“Exactly,” said Quentin. “Like, I'm still -”

He gestured inarticulately. “Even in this place, you know, it's basically a utopia, but I'm still not -”

“I get it,” said Eliot, rescuing him.

“I’m so glad it's not just me,” said Quentin, with feeling. “I know that's fucked up. But thank fucking God, Eliot.”

Eliot nodded. Something in his throat was tight; it was probably the pollen.

There was a small copse of trees at the end of the path, which Eliot led them into. It was a complicated enough journey that he started to wonder whether it was all an elaborate prank that Plum had played on him. She seemed like the type.

But then they came to a little clearing, and there it was: a stone house, not especially grand, but visibly aged and big enough to house a small army of small English children in the interwar period with a penchant for fairy stories.

“Wow,” said Quentin. “I had no idea this was here.”

“Apparently there used to be a road by the back, but nobody used it, and then a storm blew a tree across it,” said Eliot. There was a bubble of nervousness rising in his chest. It made him feel like he was on fast-forward. “Someone comes and checks on it every once in a while. Uh - here.”

He fumbled in his pocket for the keys, and then dropped them in Quentin's hand. “Plum, she had them. Don't ask, long story. But I just thought since we didn't go before - and I know that it's not the same, but apparently there's a lot of old Fillory stuff that he left the kids, so -”

It took Quentin a second to piece this all together, and Eliot took the opportunity to stride ahead, doubling back to pluck the keys out of Quentin's hands so he could open the doors.

Inside, it was exactly as Eliot had pictured it: a dusty receiving room, the furniture covered in heavy white sheets, still as death. Quentin came up behind him, and they surveyed it together.

“Thank you,” said Quentin, quietly, and Eliot surged forwards to start pulling off the coverings, driven by a skittery anxious energy in the pit of his stomach. He threw open the curtains, letting the warm light shine in and sending dust motes dancing. He was aware of Quentin watching him for a long moment before taking a few steps into the room, looking around, and joining in.

It was bizarrely satisfying, sending movement and light back into the untouched old rooms. Plum had said that the house had been abandoned in the 50s, and if Eliot paused too long, it started to feel like a mausoleum. When they were done with the first room, he stopped at the edge of the room and met Quentin's eyes for a long second, before turning away simultaneously by some unspoken agreement and heading in opposite directions.

It took longer than Eliot had expected to cover his half of the house: it was filled with old-fashioned little nooks and rooms, things like pantries and larders that he'd grown used to not seeing over the past half century. It hadn't been long at all since most houses had been like that, not by Eliot's standards, but it was still jarring to be there, like being thrown back in time.

When he reached a dead end, in a dark little room which he was pretty sure had belonged to a housemaid, he turned back. The house looked better, but there was still something disconcerting about it. It was as though it was waiting for something.

He went back through the other half of the house, looking for Quentin. He'd found some Fillory stuff, though not much, in an oak-panelled study on the first floor. There was a desk that didn't quite match the decor, shoved in a corner, and a few first editions piled on top of it. In a bookshelf were some notebooks, which he avoided touching. He figured Quentin would be able to make more sense of it.

He was starting to wonder if Quentin might have just left when he finally found him, suddenly, in a room with tall windows that was empty apart from a tall, old-fashioned grandfather clock. Miraculously, it was still ticking. Quentin sat across from it on the exposed floorboards, arms around his knees.

“Hey,” said Eliot, and sat next to him, mirroring his posture. The late evening light streamed into the room from the windows behind them. All the nervous energy that had been pushing Eliot onwards seemed to drain away all of a sudden.

“It's the clock that they went through,” said Quentin, voice flat. “The Chatwins. To Fillory.”

“Did you try it?” said Eliot, mostly joking. He'd seen weirder things, after all. Quentin didn't smile.

“Another world,” he said. “Seems pretty fucked up now, after everything.”

“I guess,” said Eliot.

“You take your problems with you,” said Quentin. “I should've learned that by now. It's not about where you are. It was stupid to think anything else.”

“I think children's book rules are different,” said Eliot, as gently as he could.

“Two of those kids went missing,” said Quentin. “So - who knows. Some people are just made wrong.”

“No,” said Eliot. “Stop wallowing. You weren't - if anyone was, it was me. But I'm starting to think - you were right, before. Living here fucks up the programming. Sand in the cogs, you know?”

“Yeah, maybe,” said Quentin, before rolling his head towards him. “Why are you actually here, El?”

Despite everything, it blindsided Eliot. Perhaps it was that the house felt like a dream, dislocated in space and time; everything outside of that bright, quiet room seemed a world away. How could Eliot have thought it was obvious? It felt like a million things were happening at once. The way forward was as obscure to him as if they were sitting in the dark.

The problem was that there was no room for ducking the facts when he was doing it properly. Eliot could do ironic, he could do referential, he could do oblique. But this way - he couldn't look at it sideways. He didn't have any choice but to face it head on.

Quentin had said _I like you_. It hadn't sounded stupid when he'd done it. Eliot supposed that was the sense of it, whatever it was that he was going to say, but it wasn't right, too. It was too much, not enough - something.

He just wanted to say, _yes_ . _Okay_. For it to be as easy as that, and for that to mean something easy, a life that he could slip into.

It wasn't hard to want, he realised with some surprise. It wasn't like how he felt whenever he thought about it in terms of the big universe stuff, or how he felt whenever he thought about doing it the way people usually did - gesture, confession, wedding bells. Thinking about that was both stressful and embarrassing.

But boiling it down to just - being around. Talking, fucking, whatever. Looking for Quentin, and finding him there.

That felt like safer ground. Just a different version of how it already was.

“Eliot,” Quentin said again. “You don't - it's fine.”

“What?” said Eliot absently, before shaking himself out of it. “Wait - actually, what?”

“I get it,” said Quentin. His gaze was steady on Eliot's face. Briefly, Eliot remembered how it had been, the night after the apocalypse, Quentin looking at Eliot in the orange light like he could see right through him. “It's fine. I know what you mean. I mean - I know you. You don't have to.”

“No,” Eliot said. “Just - hold on. One second.”

It would be so easy to just let it go. Quentin did understand; Eliot could tell. He could read Eliot as well as Eliot could read him. But then - he remembered how he'd felt at Alice's apartment, like he was on the verge of something real. It would be so easy to let it happen, no questions asked.

But that wasn't the same as choosing it with both hands, and Eliot knew that. There was sort of vaguely falling, because it was easier, and there was making the choice to believe in something every day, though it was pointless enough that it hurt. And there was something in between, Eliot thought. He wasn't sure how to get there, but he was pretty sure that it was an option.

 _Moment of truth_ , he thought, and swivelled, so he was kneeling in the sunlight facing Quentin.

“Okay,” he said. “So, before. I wasn't - I still think everything that I said. But - normal is broken, now. It's not the same anymore. Right?”

“Right,” Quentin agreed.

“And - I have this bit that I do,” he said. “Everyone has their thing which we don’t talk about. Yours is the fact that you would wear an actual skin suit if it meant you could be a real boy. With you, we don't talk about it.”

“You bring it up _constantly_ ,” said Quentin. “And I'm already basically wearing a skin suit. As in, my actual skin.”

Eliot threw him a look.

“Sorry,” said Quentin, not looking sorry at all. There was a brightness in his eyes, like he was holding back a smile. “Keep going.”

“My thing,” Eliot continued, pointedly. “is that I've wanted to bang this one guy since the year 4000 BC. And - when that was what it was, I could deal with it. I honestly thought everyone already knew. It was easy to talk around it all the time, like a joke that we all got. But then we actually did it, and - I still want something. Not just to do it again, either. Something else, on top of that.”

Quentin was leaning forwards. Eliot made himself look him in the eye.

“We're going to live for the rest of time,” said Eliot. “I don't know how long that's going to be. But I don't think I really care about fucking with humans anymore. I kind of just want to fuck with you.”

“Okay, yeah,” said Quentin, fast, and tipped forwards into Eliot, gracelessly, pulling him down until their mouths met. It was familiar, now, which was paradoxically new to Eliot, sending a surge of righteous joy through his chest.

 _Good,_ he thought, nonsensically. _It's good, this is good, it's worth it._ He flattened his palms against Quentin's back, the surprising solidity of it.

Quentin mumbled something into Eliot's mouth.

“What?” said Eliot, pulling away slightly.

“I said, you're such a fucking sap,” said Quentin.

“That's _extremely_ bold, coming from you,” said Eliot, before ducking his head back down, shutting them both up for a long while. It was so nice to just make out, like horny teens, until Eliot’s mouth felt bruised and all he could taste was Quentin. Looking at it this way, it was hard to see the downside of having so much time.

When they resurfaced, it was finally dark outside, and the clear skies from before had been usurped by rain. It pattered gently against the windows, and every now and then thunder rumbled across the sky.

“I hope nobody steals Newt's car,” said Quentin.

“Newt should pay someone to take it away,” said Eliot, idly, rubbing his thumb over the slight furrow in Quentin's forehead. “But - we can check on it in the morning. And then -”

Quentin quirked an eyebrow at him. “Then what?”

Eliot hesitated for a second, before deciding. “Oh, who cares. We'll figure something out.”

“Yeah,” said Quentin, grinning at him, and Eliot found himself smiling back. It felt obscene, precarious, terrifying.

But he couldn't bring himself to care too much about it. He had the rest of time stretching out in front of him to overthink it.

There were worse things.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Sorry it got so convoluted. I wish there had been more jokes and less of the 'God is dead', but it just be like that sometimes I guess.


End file.
